According to my dad, who is old, in the 1970s if you drove around with the high beams on or your lights misadjusted, the police would hunt you down like a rabid dog. Today, it seems that you can strap the sun itself to the front of your car and never get bothered. Funny how things change.
Lol. Your Dad is right. There are plenty of us who have spent quite a bit of breath cursing the fact that, while we were not permitted to blind old people at night while we blasted "Bang a Gong" at them, we are now, as old people, permitted to be blinded, as we quietly hum along with "Bang a Gong" with the windows rolled up. *Sigh* We sacrificed so much for you durn kids....
while i fully agree with you (damn those illegal HID kits nobody seems to stop) I eventually caved to the old maxim "if you can't beat em, join em". The irony to me is that with brighter lights up close, distance vision was actually worse (kinda like how having a interior light on at night nukes your vision, it's the same thing really, just not as pronounced) I'm not that old, but my vision has always been sharp, and excessively bright lights literally give me a headache. Despite having asked cops if they ever actually stop these guys (to which they answered, yes they do) Year's have rolled by and i've never been questioned about it. Now of course, they've moved on from HID retrofits and onto lightbars...I feel like at some point the cops are going to HAVE to step in as this brightness war escalates.
@@anne-droid7739 I'm only 33 myself, but when I went through driver's Ed we were taught not to turn on our brights when we are within 500 ft of another vehicle. I get blinded by the super bright LEDs and others who just don't give af these days. I flash my lights, but nothing but a middle finger is the usual response.
@@jr2904 It gets worse: I've had experiences where I'd flash my brights at someone who was blinding me, and they'd flash _their_ brights back at me, because apparently those miniature suns were their fucking low beams! How?
Also, turn signals that are white or purple or any color under the sun other than the proper amber or red. Never used to be tolerated, now never enforced. Same for tinted windows and "smoked" light covers. The other day I was behind a Mazda and was cussing them for not using their indicators - then when I got really close I saw they actually *were* using their indicators but it was impossible to tell unless you were right up close and looking DIRECTLY at the indicator. It had blacked-out taillight covers... Meanwhile, I have a motorcycle with a weak electrical system and I wanted to replace all the incandescent bulbs with LEDs in order to minimize the power draw. The headlights weren't a problem, and they are the biggest draw by far, but I can't find any motorcycle indicators that are worth a flip. They are all dangerously dim, even the really expensive ones. I found some LED replacement bulbs that are plenty bright and fit the OEM sockets, but the bulb part is too big to physically fit behind the factory lens, so they won't work. All this after looking long and hard and going through several flashers before finding one that would work with the bike and not force me to use load resistors with the LEDs, thereby completely cancelling the whole reason for going LED. AARGH!
Imagine halogen being "too bright" and nowadays we have blinding HID and LED lights. I'm seriously been behind some cars and the flashing orange turn signal is like a strobe light. They are ridiculously bright. Light turns green, the cars pull away, and I'm still seeing spots from that turn signal. You know it's bad when you have to put your hand up to block people's brake lights and turn signals because they're so ridiculously bright.
In winter (it usually begins after DST "fall back") I have to drive with my sun visor blocking the entire oncoming lane of traffic. I guess I suffer from night blindness, but it seems like it's gotten exponentially worse as more people buy new LED-headlight cars. I read something about them not bothering to adjust the beam angle at the factory and just putting a note in the owners' manual... which nobody reads. Been told on Reddit that I shouldn't be driving, that it's a disability and I'm putting people at risk, and that I should be riding the bus. But I'd be fine if nobody had those ridiculous headlights.
@@qdllc As a counterpoint to your counterpoint, there is a limit. If people aren't noticing you, having brighter lights isn't going to fix that. In fact, brighter is _much_ worse for safety because for the driver with the brighter lights, their eyes have adjusted to that brightness, and anything outside of the beam of light will appear much 'darker'. For the other drivers, night vision gets reduced significantly to where all you can see at times is very brighr white or total darkness. In other words, brighter lights increase the contrast between light and dark and this causes some of the areas that used to be visible to now just look like a damn black hole.
12:56 Worth noting here that for many years it was the distinguishing factor between consumer vans and light trucks and the fleet models: fleet managers had no interest in a replacement headlight that cost $300 instead of one that cost... about 12 bucks.
@@bryonmorgan5208 I have been starting to see vehicles in larger commercial fleets which do not have sealed beam headlines, and I'm not sure whether it is that they have dropped them completely or that they have flipped what is the default. I still see new ones that do have them too in certain cases.
@@bryonmorgan5208 my dad’s 2015 F-650 has sealed beam headlights while his 2019 f-650 does not. My dad also told me when he went to his auto part store they straight up didn’t believe him that the 2015 had sealed beams
I deliberately bought a fleet truck brand new in 2015, it was actually part of a USFS fleet order that the USFS declined to receive because it was hail damaged. (I have yet to see any evidence of this damage..) In addition to being a brand new, V8, 4x4, tow package, locking rear axle truck for $25k in 2015 it also has the lowest cost headlights and least fidgety crap on it. Stuff can still fail, but it's cheap to replace when it does. Coworkers, random internet dorks and the dealer insisted I would get sick of the basic truck and want to "upgrade"... uh it's been seven years still waiting for that urge.. still kinda think the fleet model was the right choice!
@@bryonmorgan5208 GM has done away with the sealed beams on the Express/Savana van and as of 2019 they would all have the cat eye style higher trims had. The work truck trim silverado/Sierra definitely don't have sealed beam anymore especially after the most recent models.
I worked at the plant that made these headlights. The metal that you referred to as the reflector inside the headlight, was not a piece of metal, it was a coating of aluminum applied directly onto the glass.
He literally says this at about 6 minutes in. He talks about how the metal being totally cut off from outside air will prevent it from oxidizing. He called it a "glass envelope."
I am so thrilled to learn about something that I have literally wondered about since I bought my first Jeep CJ... probably even longer in the past, if I could remember far enough back. :-D (also the note about right-hand drive and headlight patterns was fascinating!)
Agreed! I've owned a bunch of Subarus and thought about some of the cooler JDM headlights available along with wanting a Skyline or other JDM only car. I never thought about the headlight issue either. Just the steering wheel and the shifter being on the wrong side.
@@steveg5122 You also get a drop in retrofit that changes the sealed beam to accept a H3 halogen capsule, giving you a replaceable lamp and a glass envelope, though you do run into issues of it no longer being totally sealed. Does however allow you to go to the 65W plus lamps with no problems.
You've got to be one of the only channels that will go in-depth on some small topic like this. It's strangely mesmerizing and educational. The sort of thing I'd never intentionally seek out, but I'm never mad I watched!
Found the last topic to be one of the most interesting fun facts. Never knew the headlights block the left side and can be backwards on imported cars since they block the right.
About your "backwards" headlights issue. As a Brit, when we take our cars onto mainland Europe we have to fit something that my dad always used to call 'sticky dippers', basically bits of plastic you stuck to the headlight glass to mask off the part of the dimmed beam that was on the wrong side of the road. More modern ones seem to have some lensing in them to cast that light back across to the shoulder where they are meant to be. Have a look for "headlight deflectors UK to Europe" they generally only cost about £5 and might mean you can drive your Figaro at night again...
@@jaskajokunen3716 Same in Europe/UK and you WILL be stopped for it. Also the car would not pass annual inspection so would be banned from the road and since UK cop cars have ANPR cameras linked to a database they don't even need to be looking for you, as soon as you come into view of the cop car's camera you are done.
If you're posh you go for the modern lensed sticky dippers. If you're cheap you use the black plastic stickers. If you've completely forgotten the bloody things and are now in the ferry queue you improvise with electrical tape :-). While on the subject, does anyone else remember the little bottles of yellow dye to PAINT your headlights? That was to comply with the (thankfully now repealed) French legislation requiring yellow-tinted headlamps. Good for cutting glare, not so good for illuminating anything more than 10 yards away. Happy times..
after living in Germany for 2 years and returning to the US for the first time, the difference between headlight glare was *drastic*. driving in the US felt much more dangerous as it's very difficult to see at night with all the glare from other vehicles.
Some of our EU neighbors pump their headlights with Chinese LED "bulbs" made to fit the sockets. These things throw the optical parameters way off kilter sending light in all directions. It even blinds you off to the side but doesn't light the road ahead properly.
European countries have triangular stickers that alter the beam pattern of your headlights to drive in countries that drive on the opposite side. Good for example, for people from the UK that drive over to France often. Worth looking into for your Figaro- it won't throw light to the shoulder, but you won't blind oncoming traffic at least.
If you aren't returning to the home country, you might as well just adjust the lights for your side of the road. Edit: Wasn't there in the video yet. I don't recall my JDM MR2 having this issue, but the headlights might have been replaced before I purchased it.
You would think in a modern european car this is changeable in software. It's been a long time since car companies made country specific cars (Cortina vs Taunus or Cavalier vs Ascona). It would be somewhere deep in that car options menu, but doable. Possibly even set by the Sat Nav.
FYI, the rest of those 11 styles of sealed beams were created in the late '80s, _after_ the sealed beam requirement was dropped, when automakers -- especially GM -- wanted smaller headlamps to fit the pointy-nose styling of the era, without the expense of designing and manufacturing bespoke headlamp lenses for them. They were used on cars like the Chevy Camaro and Oldsmobile Cutlass Supreme.
The 1980 thru 1986 RWD Oldsmobile Cutlas used 4, 4x6 rectangular sealed beam headlights. It was the same 4x6 bulb set up (2 hi/low, 2 hi only) that GM started using on many cars in 1976. 1978 and 1979 Cutlass' got 2 (1 combo hi/low each side) of the larger rectangular sealed beam (i think 5x7). The 1987 model year started getting composite headlight lenses. The Camaros got the same old 4x6 through 1992 i think, at least through 89. So maybe you're thinking of trucks or something, they maught have been odd sized sealed beams. The GM B, and C Body cars (RWD Delta 88, LaSabre, Fleetwood, Ninety Eight, Estate Wagons, Electra, Safari, Bonneville/Parisienne kept the 4x6 sealed beam a long time to accommodate the Vigil Light system. (the colored lights on the fenders facing the driver that were lighted via fiber optic cables from a tab on the center of the sealed beam where the molten glass was pinched closed during manufacturing. For real, I'm not making this up, they really did work like that. Lol)
As I mentioned earlier, I rented a GM impala or sumpin like that, and held a flashlight out the window. It was a good light, I'm not kidding, it was brighter than the headlights. I'm not making a joke, the headlights just sucked that bad, I thank the gods I had brought the flashlight with me. Can't believe there's rules against fixing lights so they work but not against auto makers for making lights that are weaker than the lanterns with candles in em.
I’ll never figure out how this dude pumps out perfect scripts like this so quickly. Good work as always, and never let the pressure of success slow ya down.
@@Ironic1950 yea, but those are usually mispronouncing or accidentally conjoining 2 words, and maybe joking around with it. The script itself is captivating, entertaining and informative. I think that's what OP's talking about.
Your Figaro has H4 bulb in the headlights, and if you nip off the 3 locating lugs in the base you can slightly rotate the bulb to suit righthand traffic, the low beam filament is partly blocked by a trough and rotating it will block out the part of the beam which blinds oncoming traffic. Of course some of the optics are also molded into the glass, but this trick should suit you just fine...
the problem with the much brighter white lights is that when one comes behind you, your nighttime vision goes away and your mirrors become next to useless as all you see are a pair of white orbs. and worse, sometimes the road lanes in front of me disappear and i have to turn on my high beams to see. compared to the nice warm yellow of y old truck that lights the road just fine and allows my nighttime vision to remain letting me see a lot more of the area around me without having to blind anyone in front of me
yeah its gotten way worse in the past year or two. I hate driving at night now, its always a gamble whether someone will be tailgating you like crazy and blinding you
I have mirrors that I can adjust in the car and I turn the mirrors down a bit at night. I have to dip my head a bit to look at the mirror but it's worth it to be able to see.
@@Laodell would be nice if some one made anti glare film for mirrors, I've got tow mirrors on my truck so I'm getting a nice double tap, though there are also a couple trucks so lit up with LEDs all around I swear you can see them from orbit
My pet peeve with new cars is that the panel lights cannot be dimmed enough. with new cars having huge screens, I find that the screens and instrument cluster almost never go dim enough to allow good night vision. The headlights don't need to be nearly as bright in old cars because you can dim the instrument cluser so much more, allowing your eyes to adjust much better to the dark
And the panels are touch. Touch in a car should be completely illegal. Tactile feedback is extremely important so you can keep your eyes on the road ... I remember when using phones in cars was illegal. Now the car itself is practically a phone.
Truth : panel lights cannot be dimmed enough - I fidgeted with mine the other night and found I was already on lowest - BOO! I have several tints of window film though - planning to 'stealth' my dash-cluster anytime soon.
They can't? When was that ditched? I mean my two cars are 10 and 12 years old, but not only can i dimm the (still analogue) gauge cluster down to completely dark, the small radio/nav display (non touch) i can dimm too, but it already does have a daylight and night setting that it switches to according to ambient light which actually works quite well.
You left out one really major advantage to having these standardized lights. With only one type of light in two variants, the production runs were enormous, in the 10's of millions, so the prices were very low. If you had, say, an 8-million car year, that's 16 million lamps and probably an equal number for the replacement market. In the '70s and '80s, I remember a "regular" sealed beam going for maybe $2 and a fancy halogen one for $5 (about $5 and $12 today, respectively). Generally they were so rugged that they could last 10 or 15 years and I only had to replace them when the lenses got too eroded by rock chips.
There's a guy in a truck with insanely bright headlights that I pass every night on the way home from work. The first time I saw him, I flashed my high beams to let him know his were on. I guess he thought he was going to be a smartass and turn his high beams on and they were EXACTLY the same brightness as his regular lights.
@@mendonesiac My friend and i did some tests with his stock brand new nissan pickup. With the high beams off his stock LEDs where enough to blind me when I passed him on a flat road and if I didn't know any better I would have though his high beams where on.
@@squidiz496 It has gotten ridiculous. I drive a '98 pickup and when a newer vehicle tailgates me at night there's a shadow in front of me and the road is lit up on both sides, completely overpowering my lights. It's really distracting.
I'm an auto mechanic, and sealed beams are a nice occasional surprise. Most anything beats several hundred dollar plastic headlights that require removing the bumper to replace the bulb. The plastic covers/lenses are 100% guaranteed to need replacement at least once over the life of the car, and parts plus labor is going to be an extra $1,000. That's 1/25th of the purchase price of the car to replace the headlights one time.
If your car is in a garage most of the time, then it might go its lifetime without needing the lenses to be replaced. Since it doesn't get the UV light exposure when inside.
The covers can just be polished with fine abrasive compound and sprayed with UV resistant sealant, no need to replace the housing unless they're cracked or broken.
@@joshuagibson2520 When phones in 10 years became disposable jewels, cars might as well. Is housing following the same trend too? Hope not but you never know...
We also used to require cars to have real, functional bumpers at similar heights. Now with automakers left to their own devices, anything that looks like a bumper on modern cars is merely a styling suggestion, and the height differences between cars and SUVs means that a minor parking lot bump can now end up causing thousands of dollars of damage -- especially if you end up breaking one of those frightfully expensive modern LED headlamps.
It’s because as crash technology advanced we realized that crumple zones and exerting as much force over the entire front of the car helped saved lives. Dying in a 25-35 mph collision was a thing back in the day, now adays, thanks to seatbelts, crumple zones and airbags, you might walk out with nothing more than some cuts and bruises
@@TheBeeMan1994 Except for the fact that now that cars are safer, people drive like idiots far more often. It can be raining hard enough that you can't see more than 10-15 feet in front of your car and yet folks are still trying to drive 75+, knowing accidents aren't as severe as they used to be. It has truly been a double edged sword. I like to drive fast when it's possible and there aren't many others around still, but some people have completely lost that fear of being seriously injured or killed from doing stupid sh*t and just don't pay attention in general.
@@anthonyferguson7158 ESC sadly has it's share in that too. Don't get me wrong, it is a good safety feature that has saved many lives. But when it became standard in cars i heard idiots say "nothing can happen, the car has ESC, no matter how fast i drive it can't crash or slip off the road". Nothing ever will be able to cope with idiots that do not understand that physics always win. Even autonomous cars will not help, because they will find a way. They may be hacked and "tuned" to give their resident idiot "an advantage" over others or do something it isn't supposed to. My unpopular opinion is that driving a car needs to be more difficult again. So people focus on driving and learn how to drive properly.
@@nirfz Can't love your comment about stability control and many other safety features enough. It can save people from themselves quite often, but it's not intended to make any car an autonomous vehicle. It's there to give you more margin for error if you accidentally screw up. I'm not saying go completely back to the old days, but people did actually have to pay attention and use some skill when driving before, and they tended to be more cautious because of it. Folks just don't imagine what can go wrong at any time anymore and adjust their driving accordingly for conditions it seems. I'm kind of glad I still drive a 2000 Maxima. It has a 5 speed as well which tends to make me pay attention more just in general. The only real safety features are ABS and airbags, which for me is quite enough, and I know I'm actually the one controlling/driving the vehicle.
I never saw anything wrong with sealed beam headlights myself. They worked perfectly fine and are far cheaper to replace than other headlight designs. Since they were made of glass they didn't get cloudy over time like the plastic headlights did. Automakers should have never phased them out entirely.
@@exoticcar5482 unless they use an existing manufacturer that makes them out of glass to supply them. Like Sylvania, General Electric, or Philips. Even so, the customer that buys such vehicles can always switch out the cheap plastic sealed beam headlights in favor of some good aftermarket glass ones. They're still going to be 50-state DOT legal. There are plenty of aftermarket manufacturers out there that make parts that are much better than stock.
also most components of a sealed beam headlight can be infinitely recycled, as they're mostly just plain metal and glass, almost no plastic waste to speak off.
Funny when the headlights were all the same you could easily tell one make/model from another, now the headlights are different, but the cars all look about the same.
In German car manuals there is/was a section about how to modify the headlights for when you drive in a left-hand-side-driving country (e.g. England). As I remember it, you had to add some triangles of duct tape at the right places of the headlights to avoid glare for oncoming traffic. (I never drove my car to England, so for me this was a curiosity.)
We had the same instructions in Britain, but presumably mirrored. :) Most people prefered to either just paint the headlight yellow or buy a sort of stick-on lens though.
No longer applies. I drive in Europe regularly (UK driver + car) and the only legislation is that your lights must not dazzle other drivers. I've never once been stopped or flashed in my UK 2018 Renault Kadjar with unmodified headlights, nor on my previous vehilces.
@@TheDailyRant2023 In the off chance he managed to read a comment left 2 weeks later, I looked up info about the stick on beam deflectors in case they could be a solution to the issues he is having with his RHD Nissan, and while doing so I found that LED headlights are suggested to have a flatter beam than halogen bulbs/headlight lenses, so this is likely why it's no longer required and probably why your relatively new Renault doesn't get flashed. I don't know that your car actually has LED headlights, but I seriously doubt you could drive on the right without altering the beam otherwise.
I distinctly remember going on vacations in France (Left hand drive cars) taking our British car (Right hand drive) in the 1960-70s. Not only were we required to apply a special clear paint to make them yellow to match French headlights, but we had to stick what was basically black tape over one quarter of each headlight to block the beam that would otherwise blind oncoming drivers. Apparently from another comment this is still happening but maybe no longer the yellow paint.
I remember my last car having a template in the manual and some small lines integrated into the lights themselves for aplying tape on the headlights for wrong-side-countries.
When coming to the UK with our car from Germany just 3 months ago, we were required to attach stickers called "Beam benders" in a specific location on both headlights. This way our light beams were bent (in the portion pointing into the wrong corner where they would just blind other drivers) to point the right way.
@@Konsumkruemelmonster were you informed of this when entering the country? I plan to do the same in December, but didn't know of this headlight incompatibility until 25 minutes and 20 seconds ago
for glass vs plastic it's related to the reflector technology. pre mid 90s, they used a smooth reflector and then used fresnel ridges on the glass lens to focus the beam pattern. mid 90s and later they had complex multifaceted reflectors which allowed clear polycarbonate lenses
Polycarbonate would still allow using Fresnel lenses though. As far as I know polycarbonate headlights are mandatory in the US for new designs due to being less fragile and much less dangerous in case of an accident with pedestrians.
The first Fresnel lenses I experienced were soft plastic magnifying glasses that were kind of weak, with the pattern lines interfering with whatever needed to be seen and magnifying.
One other advantage of sealed beams is that they get hot, which means they melt ice and snow to keep your lights clear in the winter. I have an old truck that I put retrofit LEDs in, but after getting caught in a nighttime ice storm and having my lights encased under a half inch of ice, I put the old halogens back in.
You should check out technology connections other video on traffic lights, Aparently the first led traffic lights had a similar issue so they added heating elements to them
@@spencerwarren8302 Living in Wisconsin I remember this happening. Fancy LEDs went up, first blizzard and all the lights facing the wind were plugged solid.
@@transtubular Of course they clear their car. The issue, as mentioned by the commenter immediately above you, is that if you are driving during a blizzard, the snow sticks to LED bulbs and covers them while you are still driving - there's no built in way to keep them clear. Old headlamps got hot enough that they would always melt the snow off. LEDs are both fortunately and unfortunately designed to be a lot more energy efficient, and therefore do not get hot during use - which is great most of the time, but really inconvenient when you need it most.
21:20 British/Irish people over 30 all know this. You used to see cars on the road, often with caravan, going to or from France - with "beam benders" installed. (Also, the cheap option: a triangle of black tape...) I don't know how common France as a holiday, and taking your car to get there, really was, but you only had to see it a few times before you asked Dad what that was.
And still today it's actually mandatory in the EU to have block off stickers on your lights if you come temporary in a country that drives on the opposite side from your origin country. And if you import a car from the UK or Japan to a LHD country in the EU it's normally mandatory to install correct headlights (even for collectible cars). Cars do not pass the semi-annual road worthy control if the beam is not correct.
I hate it so much when I've got someone behind me with near-orange turn signals and bright bluish headlighs, mkaing me think I'm being lit up by police here. I work nights, so I drive in the dark both ways, and it's frustrating how some people's regular lights are as bright as many other's brights.
They're clowns the lot of them. They would piss themselves driving a 100% pitch black road, yet they think they're cool flexing 5k lumens on a well-lit highway or city road. I really loathe them too.
I actually find it very difficult to drive at night now without polarized sunglasses because there are so many cars with lights that are way too bright.
When in a car at night (as a passenger, I don't drive), even closing my eyes isn't enough with some cars. I'm autistic and have sensory issues because of it, so lights can be an issue on bad days in general (even just street lights can hurt my eyes sometimes) and those bright car lights even hurt with my eyes closed on those days, let alone if I had to keep them open in order to drive (good thing I don't have a license lmao, I'd absolutely get into an accident because of it)
you arr just concentratin on the bright Spot, their are NOT Brighter, just other Color and a smaller aperture than the Old big Dishes make you focus on the modern ones...
One of my favorite parts of Car & Driver magazine’s long term test fleet recaps is the maintenance cost section and, specifically, the cost of replacing a headlight housing. Most are upwards of $1700 now which is just crazy when you can get 90% of the performance for literally 1% of the cost with a seal beam setup.
But, realistically when are we changing the entire housings nowadays? Unless they get somehow damaged then yeah, but you usually only need to replace the bulb. Which is about the same if not cheaper than what an entire housing cost back then. Not to mention, most housings nowadays are not $1700 unless it’s an HID or Projector setup. Your basic honda civic halogen housings are like $150 for a pair.
You absolutely cannot get 90% of the performance from a sealed beam lamp though. Have you driven a modern car and a sealed-beam car back to back recently? Modern headlights are *miles* better in every way. Plus, with modern LED lamps the expensive part is the driver and the cooling solution, not the lamp chassis, so the cost advantage of a sealed-beam lamp disappears - the glass and reflector are the expensive part there, and thus achieve greater economy of scale in a sealed-beam setup.
@@6z0 I suspect their cost to replace the housing includes the labour, of which a fair bit is required to just get the assembly out on many late models.
@@LN997-i8x Labor? To take out 3 bolts holding the housing in place and fitting a new one in? Uhh, sure. That’s why you don’t pay people to do simple jobs on your car.
@@6z0 Many if not most new cars require you to remove the entire bumper skin to replace the headlight assembly, just like the Honda van in the video. It takes at least a half hour even for an experienced mechanic.
That would solve sooo many problems! As someone who uses an extremely common vehicle (in my part of the world anyway), I can tell you that the knowledge that any garage will likely have whatever replacement part I'm going to need is extremely reassuring, especially on longer road trips. Now, if it wasn't just a common model but things were standardised across ALL (or most) models... a dream! Also much more sustainable, I reckon.
If we could also standardize drivers, we could have highway heaven right here on Earth; but, alas, humans are hopelessly non-standardized, and getting crazier by the day.
I remember having to replace a light, and the guy said "Round or square?" That was all you had to know about fixing a headlight. There are chemicals that can clean the oxidation off the plastic of lights, too.
For some added info, one thing I left out of the video because my memory isn't _clear_ on it was that I'm pretty sure I wet sanded and polished the lights on that van first. They got better but I couldn't get them perfect, and that's why I bought the replacements. Plus, I was always looking for projects to do!
@@t0raneko I haven't tried it myself, but I have heard that applying a UV blocking clear coat of some kind is the trick to lengthening the life of a restored plastic headlight.
@@soldiersvejk2053 And even then, they don't last long. We used to do them to cars when I worked at Sam's club. I did it to my own car a couple times. You wet sand it a couple times with a finer sandpaper each time, dry it and apply the clear coat. Sunlight absolutely destroys the plastic headlights no matter what you do.
My dad's old service trucks used sealed beams. They were the nicest thing in the world to replace, just a few quick turns of the screws and popped right out. Hell that's the only reason as a teenager I was able to change my own glow plugs in my old diesel. Realizing that stuff could be done with only a modicum of knowledge and practice was a huge confidence booster and resulted in a lot of care being applied to that car, more than it probably deserved honestly. Now if only we could do that with modern cars...
@@Elmojomonope, working on old vehicles is so much better especially if you go back to before fuel injection was common, you had so much more space to work in, minimum electrical stuff to deal with its pretty much all around more diy friendly. not to mention you can get really good gas mileage if you know how to tune your carb , 40mpg in an small block v8 and still be perfectly drivable good.
@@tomtom7955 Oh, I totally agree! I had a '62 Chevy II Nova that was a dream to work on. I could actually sit on the fender inside the engine bay and work on the engine in the rain without getting wet. lol I thought you meant just changing headlight bulbs. That part is actually easier in most modern vehicles, since you can just pop out the old element and insert a new one. :)
If anyone has fogged headlights, chrisfix has a great video on clearing them up. It boils down to sanding, polishing, and clear coating them. Much better than buying aftermarket headlights imo.
(of course plastic headlights are good in weight reduction or even accidents, by not spreading glass shards everywhere, but I really hate the ageing yellow and the work you have to do to remove it)
I was hoping this was going to be a rant about modern headlight glare which makes driving at night particularly difficult for me. I’m glad to hear they are finally taking a look at it.
Dont celebrate allready. Adaptive/auto-off high beams are worse. They glare more, turn off to late and are extremely bright. They are great for drivers, I have tested the adaptive LED-versions and they are cool. But I also get flashed by oncoming traffic - the headlights does not "adapt" fast enough and sometimes dont work like they should. A 1-2% error rate is still to high
In the last 5-10 years, driving at night has become really frustrating thanks to all the late models dazzingly you so easily. It's only getting worse as lights get brighter and those older ones start to fall out of alignment.
@@jmkhenka I've been driving a MK3 Ford Focus with auto-dipping headlights (HID) from 2015 to 2018, and the only real challenge for the autodipping was driving on the Autobahn, as the guard rails tend to hide the headlamps of oncoming traffic (especially trucks), while the drivers got to "enjoy" my highbeam. In 2018 this car was replaced by a MK4 Ford Focus with selective beam LED headlights, and that's working great on country roads. I might get flashed about once a month, but that's about the same rate i got flashed when i first started driving a car with (manual) HID headlights. Some folks are just overly sensible. Driving on the Autobahn is still a challenge for the selective beam, as long as the front camera can't look through the guard rails.
@@jmkhenka They aren't. Some LED systems are worse in detecting cars, but Audi and BMW as well as Polestar (with the 2) have great adaptive "permanent high beam" systems, that detect well and acting fast. Also: Most drivers don't know to adjust the headlights for the loading of the vehicle, most LED and Xenons have auto-leveling. In germany, there are every day less cars with halogen and honestly, I'm glad that they go "out of fashion". Because what blinds me the MOST are poorly installed or adjusted halogen headlights. And since the sealed beam wasn't a big deal here where I live, H1, H4 and H7 are the most common lamp types so there can be many mistakes made replacing the bulb. Some LED systems are still a pain in the butt, but they are rare.
There was also a regulation on height of headlights from the ground that totally went out the window sometime in the past decade or so so now you have vehicles with their main headlights directly At eye level of other drivers
Definitely a pet peeve of mine! I drive a real car (i.e. a sedan), not an SUV or truck, and I've given up night driving because those new high-set lights blind me. Another thing I hate about modern car lights: they are far too blue (i.e. 'cool' white). A warmer, more yellow light gives far better vision than does a blue one. IMO, headlamps should be limited to about 3700 kelvin.
For real. I drive a pretty low and small car even for European standards, and i get blinded by so many crossovers and SUV's (especially when when they are behind me), not because they are doing anything wrong, but because their lights are directly at my eye level, burning my fucking eyes out.
This. I have learned hatred for the drivers of the big pickups purely because having them behind me for any more than a split second is literally painful.
@@21stcenturyozman20 SUV's I think are the real cars. The first cars had good ground clearance, they were taller, the driving position higher, you could drive with a hat on...😀
I wish they could better enforce proper aiming and maybe have a brightness limit, at least when facing other cars that you might be blinding. I'm a bit sensitive to light and driving at night is mostly fine for me (I basically never use my brights), but oncomming traffic is almost always blinding. especially with the large number of modern cars that have really bright lights for their regular low beams its really tough for me. I've even flashed my brights at people thinking they have their brights on only to be blinded back even worse. seriously, someone needs to figure this crap out.
"I've even flashed my brights at people thinking they have their brights on only to be blinded back even worse." This right here infuriates me so much, because I can't even be mad at the driver, it's the fault of our whole US automobile system, and aimless anger is the worst kind.
It's really bad. The lights are so bright that even if you can avoid staring into them and getting retina burn, you can see absolutely nothing in front of you until the car with a sun strapped to its front passes. only to be followed by another one doing the exact same thing. We also have lots of giant pickup trucks and SUVs here with the lights mounted like a meter off the ground. it's really bad.
@@maoman4855 Used to be a wattage limit for lights; 55/60. Ìt may still apply, but new technologies on filaments allow more candlepower from the same wattage. Mandatory annual or every second year with checking headlight aiming would help. A few years ago Dodge came out with real bright lights on their P/up trucks. Then for work, 500 pounds or so of tooling was put in the back, without adjusting the headlights down. About 2015 Ford came out with the update that keeps all 4 headlights on all the time. Bad enough but then guys purchase brighter bulbs. Then you have the numbnutz that think 4 lane divided hiways were built so they do not have to dim their lights. Then in Canada we have the DRLM, or Daytime Running Light Module. This energizes the hi beam filaments while in gear through a resistor. This is to make the vehicle more visible. GM has a light sensor that also turns on the running lights in the dark. This is a good feature as those on DRLM have headlights but no tail lights. How the dimwits do not realise they do not have tail lights on when the dash is not lit, is beyond me. And where are the police that do not pull people over for no tail lights or driving on hi beams all the time?
At least here in Europe there are limits. Initially on Wattage as someone mentioned before, which doesn´t do anything with modern full LED headlights of course (regulations are different here). When the first cars switched from halogen lights to Xenon lights years ago, at least around here it was necessary that the car had leveling sensors, to adjust the headlights level automatically. Same is valid for modern LED headlights. It does the same as the dial on older headlights where you had to turn the dial up with a load in the back to actually swing the headlights down. the manual approach of course almost never worked due to user ignorance. At the same time, I know a number of cars where, even with the sockets kind of keyed, it was possible to mount for example H4 bulbs upside down or crooked, which left you with a nice set of blinders as well. I am somewhat on the fence with older Xenons, but at least for LED it sems manufacturers got a grip on it and those never seem to blind me under normal circumstances. All those regulations are by the way also the reason, why almost no legal Kits were around here in Europe (or especially Germany) which allowed you to retrofit Xenons or LEDs to your car. Just lately there are some LED replacements for H4 or H7 lamps which are legal with at least a number of vehicle models (list is growing over time). Other than that, being extremely sensitive to blinding at night can indeed be a medical condition. In severe cases around here this may even prevent you from legally driving at night.
I used to work in a European lighting company (big one) and we had a recessed luminaire. At some point we decided to venture into US market. We needed to get this luminaire UL approved. In a nutshell I went from building luminaires to building tanks. Our "mostly plastic" designed was now mostly sheet metal. And the little plastic that did remain was 20..30% glass fiber. We payed a a lot of money for consultations and getting it approved. It felt like market obstructionisms at the time. In retrospect I think there might be more to UL then just milking money from Europeans 🤔
I worked for a US lighting manufacturer for a few years. All that sheet metal is for good reason as it dramatically reduces the possibility of building fires from luminaires. Although I do admit, it can be a little excessive and I detested running those tests in the lab.
I will say, as an American, that UL exists as one of the few times capitalism and the public good do actually mesh. UL exists to save insurance companies money. Insurance doesn't want to pay out when a product burns down someone's house, randomly explodes, fails unexpectedly, or other such occurances. The public doesn't want to be injured or killed. The profit motive happens to line up with the public good in this case, which makes it a self-reinforcing cycle.
I hope they're doing more than "letting us have adaptive beam headlights." They still don't address the actual problem of people using too bright of beams, because they don't react fast enough when people go over bumps or come around corners quickly. They really need to look at how many lumens the headlights throw out and in what pattern - LEDs often end up blindingly bright in one spot because all the light is focused there.
Yeah came to say this. You always can tell the cars with adaptive beam headlights cause they’ll blind you for a split second when coming toward you. Makes driving much less pleasant for other road users.
There are also some LED brake lights out there that are *WAY TOO FRIGGIN' BRIGHT* . When I get stopped behind these obnoxious dolts at a stop light I have to lower my sun visor until they take their foot off the brake.
@@willmather4046 Well, i guess a normal human wont react fast enough either to not blind you.. What annoys me alot is when i meet cars with automatic high beams, and many of them turns them back on the second your headlights are not visible any more so you get a bright flash in the side window or right before it passes your A pillar. Adaptive headlights are actually really awsome i think, as you can drive with full lights behind other cars and still see alot out to the sides etc.
@@RyanEglitis Yeah, but driving with old weak headlights sucks.. 😛 I cant stand weak headlights, but i guess that also depends on where and how you live. I drive alot in dark areas with alot of deers and stuff so i need good headlights..
Back in the 70's and 80's there was an aftermarket headlight made by Cebie called the Z-beam. It had a lens with a very sharp horizontal cut off so that the light went on the road rather than the trees and other drivers' eyes you got a much better view.
I've had cars with sharp cut offs like that. They are great on flat roads but suck where it's hilly or even on slight declines. You can't see what's ahead where the road goes level or up again.
rally boys used cebe ozkers in the 60's i still have 2 on my van from 1982 guess what they 100 watt halogen not your 45/45 bulb. plus 1 100 watt spot 2 miles and 2 broad spread for going round corners. still passed its mot uk england gb
Had a thought: The bloopers always remind me just how much care and dedication you put into these videos. The attention to detail really shows and the end result is really professional.
Wow, what an illuminating video! I'm dazzled by how you shine a light an old subject long lost down a deep and dark well of automotive history. You, sir, are truly brilliant!
it was very eloquent, however, he's just flat out wrong. he makes it seem like automakers and engineers were ignorant of a wonderful design but that's not the case at all. imagine replacing this technology and adding 3 to 500 dollars to he cost of a $7,000 sedan... and doubling the space on store shelves after you magically manufactured millions of bulbs and distributed them magically as well. the plastics technology we had in the 1970s would have probably yellowed before the end of the model year rather than the three to five years they do now in modern vehicles. when a rock breaks your headlight in 1976, it cost you $4. in 2016 it costs you $500+. in my 1994 Lincoln it was 1200 for one side. but hey good thing the bulbs themselves are only 35 bucks instead of $4 like in the 70s. oh, wait..
@@faradaysage15 You seem to have missed his entire point. The things he's talking about were done very successfully in other countries without issue. Not to mention, writing a long comment to complain about the video in a reply to someone that was just complimenting the creator is just rude.
I grew up down the street from osram sylvania, it was a huge factory in central falls, RI. Drive by at lunchtime and there would be 50 or 60 people outside. Closed down about 15 years ago. Started getting torn down a few weeks ago, makes me sad to see my state change like this.
The sealed beam sylvania silverstars I have in my 84 Corolla are from 2006 and were made in the USA. All the new silverstars I've put in anybodys cars burn out after just under a year. :(
I remember in the Army we had a bunch of vehicles which still used the sealed beam type. Hummers, trucks, even tanks. They performed well, were durable, and fairly easy to replace. Nowadays those older halogen sealed beams are getting replaced with LED headlights which are also circular and fit in the same spot. Honestly, I think the older halogen beams look better at night.
The problem with LEDs as well is they are supposed to last for 10,000 Hours yet barely reach that mark due to Driver Failure or one dead LED. These issues can be fixed, but why would you wanna waste time fixing a fucking
@@Vinnay94 Why would anything that the driver does shorten the life of an LED headlight? If you mean improper heat sink installation, the blame would be on the installer, who may not be the driver of the vehicle.
Dude....I have to give you props once more because you are one of very few TH-cam channels that actually are a joy to watch because I actually get to learn something. I wish more people tried doing this, it would help humanity out immensely. Keep up the great work and thank you.
Shut down Big Tech with their culture-destroying algorithms and things would improve, literally across entire society. Oh, and eliminate Fed department of education.
My old truck uses the quad square lights. I also have an old 1992 Geo Prizm, which surprisingly has glass styled headlamps. They’ve never faded after 31 years. It’s almost like the plastic ones they make today last just long enough for the car payment to run out…
I remember when the smaller round headlights first came out , the auto makers claimed that with the small lights they could lower the hoods on cars , of course the first thing the auto makers did was stack the two smaller lights on top of themselves , I think that started with the 1957 Rambler
Stylists always win out b/c styling is what sells cars. It's the only reason the new (2000s) Beetle ever sold at all. The mechanical design was completely subservient to the shape. Replacing the alternator started with removing the entire front fascia/bumper cover, but ladies thought the car was cute. Car makers see headlights as styling cues first and night vision aids second. Some new models are ugly simply b/c they have to be different and the stylists ran out of good looking differents. Good functioning different, not their concern.
Resulting in better fuel-economy for cars other than the Rambler. BTW, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration is required to regulate the fuel economy of new motor vehicles as well as safety.
Believe it or else, Ford had it goin' on in the early 80's. The Mustang 5.0, Thunderbird turbo, and Mk VII LSC were big friggin deals back then. Sincerely, Dude who was really into cars in the early 80s
@@rwright2046 fine I believe you - I’ll admit I don’t know a lot about this specific car I just thought the joke sounded funny. Which American car from the mid eighties would you recommend looking into?
@@Halarue I had to think about it for a bit. If you want to understand the US car industry in the early 80s, the place to start is…the 1982 Cadillac Cimarron! It was GM’s answer to the BMW 3 series and it was terrible. Once you see how bad American cars could be, you can appreciate the ones that didn’t suck.
The Mustang SVO was also supposed to debut with flush headlights but the new regulations hadn't been approved yet, so it came out with that weird design
Another benifit of these headlights was you could actually see the oncoming cars turn signal as it wasnt tiny and in the same unit which was designed for looks and not function
that's something that annoys me too. I understand that making a light module makes assembling the vehicle easier, but putting the turn signal right next to the headlight means that it is much harder to see the turn signal when the headlight is on. I miss the days when turn signals were easily visible from the side too.
I FUCKING HATE THIS SO MUCH! Aussie here, as a driver, and also someone who helped around my uncles mechanic shop, I fucking hate most new car headlight clusters with a passion. SO many cars will have indicators that are hard to see from a certain angle, or in the dark are overwhelmed by the headlights, and it drives me up the wall. Not to mention that so many new cars have icredibly painful to swap lights, its maddenning. I like the flexibility of modern standardised incandencent and halogens, however some manufacturerers make it way to hard to replace. My own car, which is a 2005 Honda Accord Euro, its a lovely thing and as cars go pretty no nonsense, with a bit of luxury. But in order to replace the parking lights, you have to go in through the wheel well. And not to mention that the fog lights are held in with a slot in tab and a single pastic push in clip, which fell out on mine and I was driving around with a fog light that was hanging out of its socket for a while before I realised! And then you have modern LEDs, which so often are dazzlingly bright, and especially on larger cars like SUVs, are often right at my eyeline in my sedan. And, Leds arent a self contained replaceable part. I'd love if we had some standardised led bulbs or whatever, like we do with older incandescent lights, but we dont, as far as im aware. If any light goes out in my car, its generally super easy to replace. Brake lights, indicators, cabin lights, easy and easy to find in stores. A set of bulbs cost like maybe 10 bucks and I keep some in my car just in case. So many cars would come in with rear brake strips that had like one or two led's out, and once you lose enough ya gotta replace the whole bloody thing, and it costs a fortune. Same with fancy modern LED headlight clusters. If car makers started using more standardised LED parts id be hyped, but no. AND yellowing plastic, and all that good stuff. Okay rant over its just annoying lmao
Have a look in the handbook for your small car. Some are designed to concert the shutter by turning the shutter. Failing that you could mask the offset with tape. We used to do that in the Uk trawling to mainland Europe. Great video really enjoyed it.
I wish there were a standard today. Regular headlights are the kinda yellow tint that they always been. Bright are a slight blue tint so you know if someone is just not turning off their brights when oncoming. Regular lights can only be a certain brightness.
A thought on LEDs; I feel like a significant issue with large LED lights (headlights, street lamps, etc.) is that they are too _intense_, rather than necessarily too _bright_. I've seen many street lamps that have the same 'blinding to look at' quality that LED headlights tend to have, but that give barely half the illumination on the ground as the old sodium lamp. Where in the past, very bright incandescent, halogen or various discharge lamps would tend to have very large filaments/light-emity-bits, modern LEDS can get absurdly high brightness out of often a single diode (or COB config) that is millimeters wide. Then you put that in a normal reflector, and you get a tiny spot of crazy bright light. It would be nice to see new reflectors and maybe diffusers used in LED lights to help mitigate that. It would also be real great if people would stop taking their lifted trucks with headlights 4 feet off the ground and aimed dead flat and adding giant fog lights that are actually high beams, but that's a different issue...
Hah. Around here the big ticket (unfortunately not in the sense of a citation) is using off-road light bars as headlights. Sometimes more than one, and always flood pattern.
Yes, exactly this! Old headlights are much better since they rarely had the surface brightness to blind you. Modern projector lamps and LEDs have far, far too much surface brightness, even though they may well be within specs (legal limits) for total light output.
"It would also be real great if people would stop taking their lifted trucks with headlights 4 feet off the ground and aimed dead flat " Exactly at rear-view-mirror height, and thus shining directly into your soul
I've noticed lately that a lot more attention is being given to LED optics. A lot of LED lamps that used to always be as you describe are now being fitted with frosted diffusers and real optics rather than slapped-together lenses or -even worse - no lens at all, just a clear cover.
I'm sure there's a whole other video in this, but as a lot of people have alluded to with the complaints about lights being too bright, there's another whole area that we're behind on. From what I've heard, standard for the amount of light headlights put out was designed for filament bulbs so it underweights bluer wavelengths relative to what the human eye sees, and that means that LED headlights are putting out more photons in visible wavelengths than older designs which are considered equally bright according to the standard, and also bluer LED lamps are worse for allowing your eyes to become adapted to the darkness outside of the beam than the more yellow/orange incandescent and halogen bulbs.
Not really. Candela is candela regardless of color (it is wavelength weighted based on the eye response curve). The regs are written with mins and maxes specified in candela.
@@brettspencer-curran8269 No, that is completely wrong. Wavelength matters a LOT. Red and amber have much less effect on night vision than blue and violet light with the same candela. That's why the Army used to issue their flashlights with red and amber add-on lenses. The shorter the wavelength, the more it hurts your night vision.
@@Bacteriophagebs you are talking about scotopic response curve. Yes that is more sensitive to blue light but in general with modern headlights you are halfway into the photopic region of the human eye response so you aren't nearly as sensitive to blue as you think.
Another excellent video. As a side note I’m pretty entertained by the presence of old Soviet cars in this video. I saw the Volga, Chaika, and the GAZ-53 truck.
If you ever run into the oxidation again, I would try and find a local detailer who can polish them. The plastic is pretty thick so you can do it a few times if needed, but they can be polished up to the point they look new!
You need to make sure you apply a UV protective sealant after polishing them, else they will go foggy again within a couple months. Even then it will only last 1-3 years depending on how much sun you get.
I may be biased since I dont have a big issue seeing in the dark. But the "responsive closed loop headlight systems" & their accompanying insanely bright harsh white LEDs are the BANE of my existence. The systems respond to slow so your just getting blasted by super bright high beam all the time for a split second and or the other car just decides your not an object too worry about... but the stop sight reflecting it's own lights back is :/
The truth is that too many people have too many competing opinions and they drown out the experts. Classic cars had these lights as "limitations" and are still classics. It surprises most people when you point this bit of trivia out. I don't think we should go completely backward, but there's issues today with style over safety and I think everyone knows it.
The auto parts stores in UK now have to stock a huge range of vehicle bulbs, resulting in the individual cost of a bulb being much higher than if there were fewer designs. Despite the numbers available, I was unable to get replacement bulbs for my US imports (Chevrolet Astro and HHR) as they were yet another design. If only the World had stuck with Sealed Beam lights, I would have been very pleased. I used to stock up with replacement bulbs during our visits to the USA. My wife never objected to a trip to Florida to get some auto bulbs at Walmarts ! Possibly one further drawback with the plastic headlights. To change a bulb on the HHR, the front wheel had to come off and the arch liner dropped- try doing that at night.
"If only the World had stuck with Sealed Beam lights, I would have been very pleased." On the other hand, one can be thankful for "improvements" which never caught on like Michelin metric wheels and tyres. 🙂
@@TassieLorenzoOh those stupid TRX tires. Id rather work with dry, cracked, over pressurized tires on some Ford two piece Widowmaker wheels than let tires become even more annoying
@@hquic I didn't import the HHR, but my wife had located one for sale on eBay in North Wales. We had both driven a rental HHR on our previous visit to the US and like it so much we just had to get one of our own. It was a lovely comfortable car.
Me and my dad had to replace the right headlamp bulb on the Chevrolet HHR around 2 years ago when the right headlamp burned out, and let me tell you, it was a difficult chore to remove the liner from the right wheel well, find the bulb, remove it, replace it in a way that doesn't run the risk of touching the glass and shortening the life of the bulb, and we didn't know what to do that the car got jacked at the wrong place and damaged the radiator, which caused the vehicle to leak coolant and overheat, and the vehicle needed a whole new radiator.
I was in Okinawa when they went from right-side driving to left-side driving. There were ad campaigns the likes you've never seen before and when people got their headlights fixed before the switchover date (which was required by law), you had to keep a piece of weather-resistant tape across the middle to be removed at the right time.
This is a thing that happened in the modern era? Wow, I had no idea... I really can't imagine why but I'm sure there was a very good reason and not just some anti-American sentiment.
Sweden did the opposite. Switched from left side to right. Maybe in the 1970's? The weird thing is that their Saabs and Volvo's always had steering on the left.
I quote: ”With the Vienna Convention on Road Traffic entering into force in 1977, and earlier 1949 Geneva Convention on Road Traffic, both requiring member states to have a uniform traffic direction throughout the country, post-occupation Japan was obliged to bring Okinawa in line with the rest of the country and international practice. Owing to assorted bureaucratic wrinkles, however, it was not until 1978 that Okinawa finally made the switch to left-hand drive.”
And to be fair it would be pretty strange if only one small island would drive on the other side than the rest of the country. And expensive since they would need to have different cars (or at least headlights) than the rest of the country.
I definitely prefer the look of the yellowish classic headlights opposed to the bright cool white headlights you see often nowadays. Also the yellowish ones apparently help to see when its raining
The blue ones are blinding to oncoming traffic and they suppress melatonin. Great for driving an all nighter but terrible for your sleep if you hop into the car to drive and get something real quick because it just reset your melatonin clock. Don't worry! They have drugs for that! And drugs to "fix" the problems those drugs caused. It all works together! 🤪👍
It's also blinds the others more easily. Everytime I drive rural roads and theres incoming (and behind me as well) white headlights it's horrible even if they are on low. This shit should be banned even if they look "cool"
That two cars you showing during the video- old soviet Gaz and Zil- actually have headlights that contain replaceable light bulb. You can unscrew the front glass and just install a new bulb, or even there are cheap LED lights that fit in there.
The weirdest thing that those are incompatible with the headlight of the video (sorry for the pun) being Soviet cars with different regulations. I know that because I tried retrofitting US light from eBay on my ГАЗ once.
Another thing about modern headlights, they put off no heat and when driving in the snow are susceptible to becoming clogged with snow or ice that sticks to them making it much harder to see. This is a minor problem that sealed beams never had.
LED traffic signals or retrofits with an LED bulb have the same issue. My city still had halogen traffic signals from 1972 in use at the intersection nearest me up through 2017. The VERY SECOND they switched to LED signals those suckers had burned out blank spots on the "bulbs" within a month of use, and that winter they were full of snow and ice making them totally unviewable. Nobody could see them. Gotta love how modern society takes something that works and has no issues, throws it away because OOOH COMPUTERS and fucks everything up just for the sake of fucking it up.
There is one thing that should be noted, that automatic Highbeams are not the best solution. Here in Europe i have a Mazda 3 2019. It has automatic Highbeams. Sometimes they need rather long (up to 3 seconds) to adapt. Its rare, but in this cases the other driver gets fully blinded and putting them manually would be faster in this case. Also when im driving on the Autobahn, the middle crash barrier lets light through but blocks the camera to notice other cars in the opposite lane. So the car sets the highbeam on full and does not except the opposite traffic because the camera cant detect the oncoming light. This will blind the traffic sometimes. I usually notice that and disable the automatic highbeam when on the autobahn. But many casual driver probably never would disable it or care. On a different note, it would be interesting to hear your opinion about the german TÜV. This organisation checks if the cars are roadworthy or have in this case highbeams that work and are correctly set up. It probably the thing you wish for in America to have standardised rules for roadsafety.
@@benholroyd5221 Fog, like after heavy drinking. It takes 2 painkillers and a big glass of water. This tech, it is infantile phase. So many recalls on it for Fords. Flashing brights like mad!
@@benholroyd5221 It not works if you make on your back fog light or your front fog lights. Older versions go on/off after automatic not "see" fog. It is same with raining sensory effects if suddenly fall many water on it. The driver of the car should not loose his/her brain at home after start the car! The option is to make off the automatic in some situations!
@@alpham777 Let me guess, 9/11 truther? They didn't need to be melted, just weakened. Ever see someone cut through rope to free themselves in a movie? They don't cut them all the way through, just far enough to pull free. Plus, the beams in the twin towers were set on trusses, and those were what needed to fail, not the entire beam.
The first time I learned about sealed beams was when one of the low beams on my 1984 Subaru burned out. I was dismayed to find out I had to replace the whole lamp and thought I'd have to source some obscure thing similar to replacing a modern headlight, but after getting one at Canadian Tire for $15 I was definitely convinced of their benefits.
If you're not watching these videos with the subtitles turned, you're doing it wrong. -bless this man's heart, he even does his own custom subtitles for his bloopers and goes to the trouble to add little Easter eggs to them
Part of the reason the light pattern was better with the sealed beams is the lenses were actually somewhat complex fresnel lenses. The small difference in placement of the low and high filaments were enough to allow those to project totally differently. Most modern headlights are just smooth, clear plastic. THose can be polished to majorly improve the look and function by the way, though if the damage goes too deep, then they obviously need replacing. Of course it's a moot point really since by the time a modern car is 10 years old, you can't get parts, especially for the electronics.
When I lived in Britain it was common to get a 'sticker kit' to apply to headlights when driving 'on the continent' It prevented dazzling oncoming drivers. It may not solve your 'unable to see' but would prevent people 'flashing' at you on low beam
The aiming thing at the end reminded me of the issues I had driving at night in the US Virgin Islands, where they still for some reason drive on the wrong side of the road, but pretty much all of their cars are designed for right-hand drive, so headlights spend most of their energy blinding oncoming traffic rather than illuminating what you need them to. Truly the worst of both worlds.
I fully agree with regulating headlights tbh. This was a much better solution than modern bulbs. I've even seen a Chevy Bolt (which isn't a remotely old car) with both LED taillights dead, and using the backup taillights on the bumper. Regulation leads to consistency.
This video was very fun to watch. Might I suggest a part two that goes into the technology of the reflectors and lenses and how they've changed over the years? We went from headlights with little lines in them to completely clear ones with no lines at all!
I love that you show Soviet era cars and trucks 😀 Still the old lights were kinda cool and in particular yellow fog lights do work. Modern LEDs are a menace to the eyes
I was thinking “What's that car that looks a lot like a Volga”, and sure enough I rewind and see the GAZ logo. Dunno what it has to do with US regulations, though.
Soviet cars always used traditional light bulbs. Same thing in Poland. Polish "Warszawa" car was in fact a copy of Russian Pobieda. It came with 170mm headlights. That headlight was used on Pobieda, Gaz 69, Uaz, Moskvich, Syrena, Żuk, Nysa, Star, Jelcz, Tarpan. And Czechoslovakian Skoda 1000MB/100? You could fit it with Polish "Zelmot" headlights too. Everything was standarized.
I recently bought a 1969 Morris Minor 1000 that has these lights! I loved that they were glass and I was immediately surprised by how impressive their performance was, ESPECIALLY the high beam (which is operated with a button pushed by your foot). This video sums up my experience quite well.
@@reggiebuffat Huh? I don't buy that. It sounds more like someone might have taken advantage of the distinctive color during war. When was the regulation put in place?
I don't understand how nobody sees anything wrong with the new led headlights. I work night shift so going and coming home from work in the dark. I'm pretty much blind on the commute because of oncoming traffic, and just waiting for the accident to happen.
You're not alone. I have to use my sun visor at an angle to block the entire oncoming lane of traffic. Thank god there's a highway divider for most of my commute. But I guess we're just supposed to take the bus if we can't deal, because it's gonna keep getting worse.
The CCT (color temperature) of the LEDs has much to do with eye strain and fatigue. The harsh cold light coming from most headlights just sucks. It should be around 3000K or below to be less straining to other drivers
I'd suggest getting your eyes tested. Your ability to adjust to bright and dark conditions does slow with age, it is not unusual for you to notice this whilst driving. If you have an accident because you are having issues seeing at night, that's on you. LED headlights are fantastic in my opinion. Better colour temperature, better at lighting the road ahead, automatic levelling, auto dipping/adaptive beam patterns, minimal light spill into opposing traffic, etc.
Adding this as a separate comment, you can buff off the oxidation on those plastic headlight assemblies. I use the turtle buffing compound with a cheap second hand orbital buffer. Then wipe it off. They get cleared up very nicely after that.
I thought this video would be about the particular optics involved in making sure all street-legal cars don't glare pedestrians and oncoming traffic. Now I kinda hope there's a video about that =)
I'd actually really like to know about that because I kind of want to design my own bike lights that light up the road well without dazzling drivers. Thinking I'll use bits of fresnel lens to reflect light from a big COB into the correct places.
@@charleslambert3368 Look at StVzo (not sure how it's abbreviated) regulations. The Germans have made it a science. You can get approved bike lights easily that cast plenty of light on the road with a cutoff.
One thing I wish the DOT would regulate: Pulse-Width Modulation flicker in taillights. Have you ever moved your eyes at night and seen somebody's taillight break down into a trail of dots, instead of a blur? Yeah, that's PWM flickering. It's horribly distracting! Even those LED *headlights* in the video show some evidence of flicker. The moving banding in those shots comes from an interaction of camera frame rate and LED flicker rate.
Thank God, another person in the world who’s qualified to regulate these idiotic things! Some do very well - modulating at well beyond what the human eye can register - or at the very least, at a rate higher than the decay rate of the LEDs being used. There are a few cars (American makes, obviously, because the garbage always has been) that flicker at such a low rate that if you move your eyes _AT ALL_ you lose the ability to even register where the car in front of you is on the road! Clearly the “invisible hand of a free market” does not fix idiotic problems that never should have made it out of a design studio.
I god I hate those. Especially the onea that have some Chris Nolan 24 hz movie flicker rate but also add the indicators as arrows or chevrons around the light. One of those comes up behind you at night and bam your mirrors are gone, you can't glance over your shoulder to see if they're going left or right and all the lane markings with reflective paint are now shimmering at you. I honestly trying these should be a law that lets you shoot out lights like that.
Yes, this drives me crazy! The worst are Cadillac SUVs, at least ones from 4-5 years ago. The problem is we are a minority. Most people cannot see this. If you do see this, you surely also see with white of TV projectors split into a rainbow too. Terribly annoying.
@@Elmojomo It is not a physics issue. If an LED is provided a constant voltage, it will produce a constant light. The flickering is from the power supply conversion, in homes from 120VAC and in cars from 12VDC. Both are too high voltage for LEDs to operate. It is “solvable” if desired, but likely at some cost.
Most modern cars nowadays require the removal of the front bumper assembly to replace them. Depending on your car...you can easily spend over 150.00 on a headlight or blinker replacement for a 12.00 bulb and a minimum of 1 hour just to remove the facia. Those old school lights had a chrome ring and 3 screws and usually took less than 10 minutes for a repair when you did it yourself. Costing you 4 to 10.00 in the 80s.
I have a 2004 Honda Accord and you have to disassemble the wheel well to get to the headlight and change the bulb. I had to have it professionally done and I am very handy.
@kerrywsmyth I totally understand. It's one of the reasons I got out of the automotive industry. They are designing things to be complicated, so 90 percent of all people can't do a simple repair.
There was a push to use polarized lights that would have eliminated glare from on-coming traffic and made the roads much safer at night. The car companies squashed the idea in 1947 because of lack of economic incentive. Unfortunately it wasn't mandated by law, which was how we implemented seat belts.
I can't argue with any of the points in this video but I also think there should be a return to these, purely for the reason that they look so friendly, while car headlights these days all look so... mean.
Cannot agree with that. I take a modern set of LED headlights which give me great light and visibility any time over old halogens. Also the old halogens if not adjusted right, or halogen bulbs not mounted right have a tendency to be more blinding than newer (self leveling) styles. I am somewhat on the edge with those Xenon lights that seem to have fallen out of fashion completely. I theory at least around here those are suposed to be self leveling because they are brighter, but it seems among those there indeed had been some quite blinding designs. Never noticed being blinded by a set of LED headlights so far (unless the driver forgot to turn the high beams of).
Have you seen those autonomous cars with googly eyes? Maybe that will get us back to friendly looking cars. I think those cars should have a smile or a grin between the eyes for good measure.
Don't get too excited for adaptive headlights, Being randomly blinded because the giant suv in the other lane has decided you don't exist anymore is honestly worse then them just having brights on
To make adaptive light good is not a easy task, I dont dispute they dont exist. They are good in expensive cars, in midrange as cost cutting take place they are terrible. Not for driver, so he keeps using them to make everyone else suffer
I meet a Tesla every morning with that fault. The idiot haven't cared to have it fixed for almost a year yet. Just turn on highbeams now when he comes. Overall automatic headlight is shit for oncoming traffic and they do not work. Should never been allowed.
True. This is extremely funny as a truck driver on a highway when the modern LED-equipped car in the opposite direction doesn't "see" your headlights and keeps blinding you as if you didn't exist.
There are not many people I watch that I would compliment their captions. You’re videos are a great exception to that. Love these videos and your captions, especially at the end of the video
Great video. In the UK we have to fit little conversion kits if we drive our cars across to France due to the light spread issue. Thanks for a nice detailed dive into a neat topic.
Yeha this fact is well known to Uk drivers who ventured into France, and had to stick those converters on the headlights. My VW with led headlights has an option in the menus to convert the lights so no need for the converters
I've always wondered what those knobby bits were for. Thank you so much for explaining that, my perplexed 13 year old self taking apart an old light would have been happy to know what they were.
14:06 So those LEDs shine into pedestrians' eyes regardless. LED car lights (front and rear) make it positively dangerous to be outdoors at night, because there's always someone driving along the road I'm walking beside, and those LEDs are so bright and so intense, they make it near impossible to see anything else.
@@milfordcivic6755 It isn't just the headlights. It's EVERY light. I get blinded by people's blinkers all the fucking time and it's infuriating. These modern cars with all LED lighting are atrocious to be around at night I don't care which direction it's facing relative to you.
6v systems (and headlights) were briefly mentioned. If you have never experienced 6v headlights, imagine driving your car with a wax candle sitting in front of an aluminum pie plate functioning as the the headlights. That is about how bright they were.
people did not drive at night back then, so it wasnt necessary. and i have driven 6v cars before, the lights are perfectly fine. get your eyes checked.
My DeLorean used to be fitted with non halogen sealed beams. I'm not sure how old they were but the square glass bulb literally was the bulb. The filament was exposed in the bulb. One day a rock punched a hole in the face of the bulb and I noticed it before turning on the lights. Needless to say I watched that bulb burn out within 10 seconds right in front of me. I wish I had recorded it.
That is how all the pre-halogen "sealed beam" lamps are. The lens/reflector was the actual environment that the filament lived in, usually with a small metal "shade" in from of the filaments to reduce glare. It wasn't until the halogen era that there was a separate capsule inside the lens/reflector.
@@abpsd73 That little "shade" isn't actually specifically to reduce glare, although it does have that benefit. It's actually a reflector that forces all of the light to go exactly where you want it - toward the main, focusing reflector - instead of spraying out at all random angles.
Yes, I remember going into an auto parts store when I first started to drive in the early 90's. Even though manufacturers could move away from them by then, most cars on the road still had sealed beams. If your headlight was out, there were only two questions you needed to answer: rectangle or round, and 2 or 4? And since two square was by far the most popular option by then, they often had a giant pile of them in the front of the store. It did tend to make getting a new headlight pretty easy.
GM did some weird things back then. Some of their cars (Camaro, for example) had half-height sealed beams. Late 80s/early 90s trucks used squares slightly smaller than standard.
I have always thought we should go back to having some more regulation on how bright headlights can be(at least for the low beams, even though many people just ride around with their high beams on all the time.) the new LED headlights are far too bright(or are pointed too high) for other drivers. Yes you can see for miles with just your low beams but nobody in the opposite lane can see more than a few feet in front of their vehicle. And it seems to be the same people that never use turn signals that will leave their high beams on when passing people heading in the opposite direction with no concern about how dangerous it could potentially be. And don’t get me started on the people that have LED light bars that they run all the time, if more people would give some more consideration to everyone else on the road I’m convinced we would have far fewer cases or road rage.
@@Naturallystated the problem is the LED lights are excessively blue, when our vision is tuned to red-orange-yellow. The french used to require yellow headlights.
I was an army mechanic, no matter the actual repair job, adjust headlights was always on the list. Most British military vehicles had the same Lucas Headlamps.
It's pretty funny seeing this just now. A few weeks ago, a friend of mine had a headlight out on his car and went to the auto parts store to pick up a replacement. He came out, put the new bulb in, and it didn't work because it was not compatible. Just goes to show how good this idea actually was
The biggest step backwards in automotive lighting I have seen this far is having the reverse lights used to light around the vehicle when it is parked. So you’re looking for a parking space and see a car with their reverse lights on there’s no way you can see who is driving, then you realize they’re not backing up because nobody’s in the car at all. Same for pedestrians trying to walk from their parking space you see reverse lights and think someone is about to reverse but they never do. Consistent conditioning of this will lead to more folks driving behind people actually trying to back out of parking spaces.
GM wanted that lighting feature but didn't want to add costly lights. Some joker realized that falsely claiming you are backing-up is not a violation of the DOT and so that's what they used. It can be disabled but is on by default from the dealer. I have a heck of a time backing out sometimes and I suspect that GM hardware-hack is a part of that.
We should have a petition to bring back the sealed beam lights, and force standardization on alternators, steering pumps and AC compressors. It's at the point now where I'm pretty sure they just change the design every two years to make sure you have to buy a new one from them so you can feel the hurt of the supply chain.
I`d love to be able to go even a bit further than this, wheel bearings ? standardize by wheel size/ weight required, shocks ? the same, pretty much standardize anything possible, EGR ? standardize by engine size/power, engine mounts ? standard !
You're right about the manufacturers doing it on purpose. Back in the day they would deliberately use bizarre non-standard nut and bolt sizes on new models to force mechanics to buy new (overpriced) spanners from the vehicle manufacturer. It took federal regulation to put an end to the practice and standardize the nut and bolt sizes.
I get why you say this, but these are items that are not safety related. And where would it stop? There's already too much government in out cars today IMO.
I remember in the 1980's, a coworker got into a minor fender-bender that broke his Mazda's headlamp. When I was paying $5 to replace my sealed beam, he was spending a few hundred dollars to replace his. I've always preferred the older lamps.
According to my dad, who is old, in the 1970s if you drove around with the high beams on or your lights misadjusted, the police would hunt you down like a rabid dog. Today, it seems that you can strap the sun itself to the front of your car and never get bothered. Funny how things change.
Lol. Your Dad is right. There are plenty of us who have spent quite a bit of breath cursing the fact that, while we were not permitted to blind old people at night while we blasted "Bang a Gong" at them, we are now, as old people, permitted to be blinded, as we quietly hum along with "Bang a Gong" with the windows rolled up. *Sigh* We sacrificed so much for you durn kids....
while i fully agree with you (damn those illegal HID kits nobody seems to stop) I eventually caved to the old maxim "if you can't beat em, join em". The irony to me is that with brighter lights up close, distance vision was actually worse (kinda like how having a interior light on at night nukes your vision, it's the same thing really, just not as pronounced)
I'm not that old, but my vision has always been sharp, and excessively bright lights literally give me a headache.
Despite having asked cops if they ever actually stop these guys (to which they answered, yes they do) Year's have rolled by and i've never been questioned about it.
Now of course, they've moved on from HID retrofits and onto lightbars...I feel like at some point the cops are going to HAVE to step in as this brightness war escalates.
@@anne-droid7739 I'm only 33 myself, but when I went through driver's Ed we were taught not to turn on our brights when we are within 500 ft of another vehicle. I get blinded by the super bright LEDs and others who just don't give af these days. I flash my lights, but nothing but a middle finger is the usual response.
@@jr2904 It gets worse: I've had experiences where I'd flash my brights at someone who was blinding me, and they'd flash _their_ brights back at me, because apparently those miniature suns were their fucking low beams! How?
Also, turn signals that are white or purple or any color under the sun other than the proper amber or red. Never used to be tolerated, now never enforced. Same for tinted windows and "smoked" light covers. The other day I was behind a Mazda and was cussing them for not using their indicators - then when I got really close I saw they actually *were* using their indicators but it was impossible to tell unless you were right up close and looking DIRECTLY at the indicator. It had blacked-out taillight covers...
Meanwhile, I have a motorcycle with a weak electrical system and I wanted to replace all the incandescent bulbs with LEDs in order to minimize the power draw. The headlights weren't a problem, and they are the biggest draw by far, but I can't find any motorcycle indicators that are worth a flip. They are all dangerously dim, even the really expensive ones. I found some LED replacement bulbs that are plenty bright and fit the OEM sockets, but the bulb part is too big to physically fit behind the factory lens, so they won't work. All this after looking long and hard and going through several flashers before finding one that would work with the bike and not force me to use load resistors with the LEDs, thereby completely cancelling the whole reason for going LED.
AARGH!
Imagine halogen being "too bright" and nowadays we have blinding HID and LED lights. I'm seriously been behind some cars and the flashing orange turn signal is like a strobe light. They are ridiculously bright. Light turns green, the cars pull away, and I'm still seeing spots from that turn signal. You know it's bad when you have to put your hand up to block people's brake lights and turn signals because they're so ridiculously bright.
In winter (it usually begins after DST "fall back") I have to drive with my sun visor blocking the entire oncoming lane of traffic. I guess I suffer from night blindness, but it seems like it's gotten exponentially worse as more people buy new LED-headlight cars. I read something about them not bothering to adjust the beam angle at the factory and just putting a note in the owners' manual... which nobody reads.
Been told on Reddit that I shouldn't be driving, that it's a disability and I'm putting people at risk, and that I should be riding the bus. But I'd be fine if nobody had those ridiculous headlights.
As a counterpoint…particularly with a motorcycle, brighter is better because somehow, people still manage to not see you.
@@qdllc As a counterpoint to your counterpoint, there is a limit. If people aren't noticing you, having brighter lights isn't going to fix that. In fact, brighter is _much_ worse for safety because for the driver with the brighter lights, their eyes have adjusted to that brightness, and anything outside of the beam of light will appear much 'darker'. For the other drivers, night vision gets reduced significantly to where all you can see at times is very brighr white or total darkness.
In other words, brighter lights increase the contrast between light and dark and this causes some of the areas that used to be visible to now just look like a damn black hole.
Those damn Ford Super Duty trucks (which every other person is in hock over) have the brightest lights on the planet.
Interestingly enough, some classic cars from 70s used to have "dimmer" block that would make turn and brake signals dimmer when the headlights are on.
12:56 Worth noting here that for many years it was the distinguishing factor between consumer vans and light trucks and the fleet models: fleet managers had no interest in a replacement headlight that cost $300 instead of one that cost... about 12 bucks.
My base model 2006 F250 has sealed beams. I think the current fleet trucks don't use sealed beams anymore.
@@bryonmorgan5208 I have been starting to see vehicles in larger commercial fleets which do not have sealed beam headlines, and I'm not sure whether it is that they have dropped them completely or that they have flipped what is the default. I still see new ones that do have them too in certain cases.
@@bryonmorgan5208 my dad’s 2015 F-650 has sealed beam headlights while his 2019 f-650 does not. My dad also told me when he went to his auto part store they straight up didn’t believe him that the 2015 had sealed beams
I deliberately bought a fleet truck brand new in 2015, it was actually part of a USFS fleet order that the USFS declined to receive because it was hail damaged. (I have yet to see any evidence of this damage..)
In addition to being a brand new, V8, 4x4, tow package, locking rear axle truck for $25k in 2015 it also has the lowest cost headlights and least fidgety crap on it. Stuff can still fail, but it's cheap to replace when it does.
Coworkers, random internet dorks and the dealer insisted I would get sick of the basic truck and want to "upgrade"... uh it's been seven years still waiting for that urge.. still kinda think the fleet model was the right choice!
@@bryonmorgan5208 GM has done away with the sealed beams on the Express/Savana van and as of 2019 they would all have the cat eye style higher trims had. The work truck trim silverado/Sierra definitely don't have sealed beam anymore especially after the most recent models.
I worked at the plant that made these headlights. The metal that you referred to as the reflector inside the headlight, was not a piece of metal, it was a coating of aluminum applied directly onto the glass.
That wasn't always the case, though.
Are we saying aluminum is not metal now?
He literally says this at about 6 minutes in. He talks about how the metal being totally cut off from outside air will prevent it from oxidizing. He called it a "glass envelope."
Aluminum is metal.
It is a piece of metal. Just a very thin one.
I am so thrilled to learn about something that I have literally wondered about since I bought my first Jeep CJ... probably even longer in the past, if I could remember far enough back. :-D (also the note about right-hand drive and headlight patterns was fascinating!)
Agreed! I've owned a bunch of Subarus and thought about some of the cooler JDM headlights available along with wanting a Skyline or other JDM only car. I never thought about the headlight issue either. Just the steering wheel and the shifter being on the wrong side.
@@BenWolkWeiss I also grew up with many many Subarus, there my favorite
you can even replace sealed beams with a european pattern, less glare and more light down the road.
@@steveg5122 You also get a drop in retrofit that changes the sealed beam to accept a H3 halogen capsule, giving you a replaceable lamp and a glass envelope, though you do run into issues of it no longer being totally sealed. Does however allow you to go to the 65W plus lamps with no problems.
Deviant Ollam learns something new.
> Is this a new vulnerability?
You've got to be one of the only channels that will go in-depth on some small topic like this.
It's strangely mesmerizing and educational. The sort of thing I'd never intentionally seek out, but I'm never mad I watched!
Found the last topic to be one of the most interesting fun facts. Never knew the headlights block the left side and can be backwards on imported cars since they block the right.
About your "backwards" headlights issue. As a Brit, when we take our cars onto mainland Europe we have to fit something that my dad always used to call 'sticky dippers', basically bits of plastic you stuck to the headlight glass to mask off the part of the dimmed beam that was on the wrong side of the road. More modern ones seem to have some lensing in them to cast that light back across to the shoulder where they are meant to be. Have a look for "headlight deflectors UK to Europe" they generally only cost about £5 and might mean you can drive your Figaro at night again...
Nice to have an update. I thought I had seen some 'reflective' type stickers but I've been living in Florida 23 years and not visited 'home' too often
Yes, I was wondering why he wasn't using those.
I thought they were even required by law.
And the reverse when visiting the UK from Europe.
People who import jdm cars here have to adjust headlight pattern otherwise the car is illegal for road use 🤔
@@jaskajokunen3716 Same in Europe/UK and you WILL be stopped for it. Also the car would not pass annual inspection so would be banned from the road and since UK cop cars have ANPR cameras linked to a database they don't even need to be looking for you, as soon as you come into view of the cop car's camera you are done.
If you're posh you go for the modern lensed sticky dippers. If you're cheap you use the black plastic stickers. If you've completely forgotten the bloody things and are now in the ferry queue you improvise with electrical tape :-). While on the subject, does anyone else remember the little bottles of yellow dye to PAINT your headlights? That was to comply with the (thankfully now repealed) French legislation requiring yellow-tinted headlamps. Good for cutting glare, not so good for illuminating anything more than 10 yards away. Happy times..
after living in Germany for 2 years and returning to the US for the first time, the difference between headlight glare was *drastic*. driving in the US felt much more dangerous as it's very difficult to see at night with all the glare from other vehicles.
There used to be rules on how bright lights could be but that got thrown out because people are selfish morons.
Some of our EU neighbors pump their headlights with Chinese LED "bulbs" made to fit the sockets.
These things throw the optical parameters way off kilter sending light in all directions. It even blinds you off to the side but doesn't light the road ahead properly.
@@daszieher That's extremely rare nowadays. I can't remember the last time I saw a car with those. Maybe six months.
@@Robkellysound which side of the Brexit divide are you on? 😃
@@thomgizziz the manufacturers are making them insane now too.
European countries have triangular stickers that alter the beam pattern of your headlights to drive in countries that drive on the opposite side. Good for example, for people from the UK that drive over to France often. Worth looking into for your Figaro- it won't throw light to the shoulder, but you won't blind oncoming traffic at least.
If you aren't returning to the home country, you might as well just adjust the lights for your side of the road. Edit: Wasn't there in the video yet. I don't recall my JDM MR2 having this issue, but the headlights might have been replaced before I purchased it.
@@overkill1340 its not about adjusting, its about the whole reflector being designed to aim light a certain way
In the UK, Halfords sell them and call them "Headlamp Converters". They were the first thing I thought of but I do not know who sells them in the US.
France had yellow headlights for many years.
You would think in a modern european car this is changeable in software. It's been a long time since car companies made country specific cars (Cortina vs Taunus or Cavalier vs Ascona). It would be somewhere deep in that car options menu, but doable. Possibly even set by the Sat Nav.
FYI, the rest of those 11 styles of sealed beams were created in the late '80s, _after_ the sealed beam requirement was dropped, when automakers -- especially GM -- wanted smaller headlamps to fit the pointy-nose styling of the era, without the expense of designing and manufacturing bespoke headlamp lenses for them. They were used on cars like the Chevy Camaro and Oldsmobile Cutlass Supreme.
Yea, my 96 Camaro I just sold had the thinnest rectangle lights I have seen
Of course it was GM.
The 1980 thru 1986 RWD Oldsmobile Cutlas used 4, 4x6 rectangular sealed beam headlights. It was the same 4x6 bulb set up (2 hi/low, 2 hi only) that GM started using on many cars in 1976. 1978 and 1979 Cutlass' got 2 (1 combo hi/low each side) of the larger rectangular sealed beam (i think 5x7). The 1987 model year started getting composite headlight lenses. The Camaros got the same old 4x6 through 1992 i think, at least through 89. So maybe you're thinking of trucks or something, they maught have been odd sized sealed beams. The GM B, and C Body cars (RWD Delta 88, LaSabre, Fleetwood, Ninety Eight, Estate Wagons, Electra, Safari, Bonneville/Parisienne kept the 4x6 sealed beam a long time to accommodate the Vigil Light system. (the colored lights on the fenders facing the driver that were lighted via fiber optic cables from a tab on the center of the sealed beam where the molten glass was pinched closed during manufacturing. For real, I'm not making this up, they really did work like that. Lol)
As I mentioned earlier, I rented a GM impala or sumpin like that, and held a flashlight out the window. It was a good light, I'm not kidding, it was brighter than the headlights. I'm not making a joke, the headlights just sucked that bad, I thank the gods I had brought the flashlight with me. Can't believe there's rules against fixing lights so they work but not against auto makers for making lights that are weaker than the lanterns with candles in em.
@@jasomkovac9115 Are you sure you actually had the headlights on, and not just the daytime running lights (DRLs)?
I’ll never figure out how this dude pumps out perfect scripts like this so quickly. Good work as always, and never let the pressure of success slow ya down.
The Dude often shows outtakes of his cockups making the vids, so he makes many mistakes, but the research is solid.
@@Ironic1950 yea, but those are usually mispronouncing or accidentally conjoining 2 words, and maybe joking around with it. The script itself is captivating, entertaining and informative. I think that's what OP's talking about.
oh wow didn't expect you to be here :0
Your Figaro has H4 bulb in the headlights, and if you nip off the 3 locating lugs in the base you can slightly rotate the bulb to suit righthand traffic, the low beam filament is partly blocked by a trough and rotating it will block out the part of the beam which blinds oncoming traffic. Of course some of the optics are also molded into the glass, but this trick should suit you just fine...
the problem with the much brighter white lights is that when one comes behind you, your nighttime vision goes away and your mirrors become next to useless as all you see are a pair of white orbs. and worse, sometimes the road lanes in front of me disappear and i have to turn on my high beams to see.
compared to the nice warm yellow of y old truck that lights the road just fine and allows my nighttime vision to remain letting me see a lot more of the area around me without having to blind anyone in front of me
Yup, I despise driving at night now a days due to white LEDS
yeah its gotten way worse in the past year or two. I hate driving at night now, its always a gamble whether someone will be tailgating you like crazy and blinding you
I have mirrors that I can adjust in the car and I turn the mirrors down a bit at night. I have to dip my head a bit to look at the mirror but it's worth it to be able to see.
@@Laodell would be nice if some one made anti glare film for mirrors, I've got tow mirrors on my truck so I'm getting a nice double tap, though there are also a couple trucks so lit up with LEDs all around I swear you can see them from orbit
@@TheDenofBadgers modern cars have auto dipping mirrors.
My pet peeve with new cars is that the panel lights cannot be dimmed enough. with new cars having huge screens, I find that the screens and instrument cluster almost never go dim enough to allow good night vision. The headlights don't need to be nearly as bright in old cars because you can dim the instrument cluser so much more, allowing your eyes to adjust much better to the dark
And the panels are touch.
Touch in a car should be completely illegal. Tactile feedback is extremely important so you can keep your eyes on the road ...
I remember when using phones in cars was illegal. Now the car itself is practically a phone.
@@ahouyearno Haptic feedback from the screen to your pinkie?
@@Ironic1950 Still doesn't tell you that you pressed what you were aiming for.
Truth : panel lights cannot be dimmed enough - I fidgeted with mine the other night and found I was already on lowest - BOO!
I have several tints of window film though - planning to 'stealth' my dash-cluster anytime soon.
They can't? When was that ditched? I mean my two cars are 10 and 12 years old, but not only can i dimm the (still analogue) gauge cluster down to completely dark, the small radio/nav display (non touch) i can dimm too, but it already does have a daylight and night setting that it switches to according to ambient light which actually works quite well.
You left out one really major advantage to having these standardized lights. With only one type of light in two variants, the production runs were enormous, in the 10's of millions, so the prices were very low. If you had, say, an 8-million car year, that's 16 million lamps and probably an equal number for the replacement market. In the '70s and '80s, I remember a "regular" sealed beam going for maybe $2 and a fancy halogen one for $5 (about $5 and $12 today, respectively). Generally they were so rugged that they could last 10 or 15 years and I only had to replace them when the lenses got too eroded by rock chips.
"too bright" should still be a reason to ban headlight models.
And blue headlights should be illegal
How, exactly, is "too bright" measured? Hmmm?
@@TheRenegade... Why?
@@joewoodchuck3824 If its bright enough to blind oncoming traffic, its probably too bright
@TrulyToxicGaming But there needs to be a measure to establish a standard. "Too bright" isn't a measure. It's a subjective observation.
There's a guy in a truck with insanely bright headlights that I pass every night on the way home from work. The first time I saw him, I flashed my high beams to let him know his were on. I guess he thought he was going to be a smartass and turn his high beams on and they were EXACTLY the same brightness as his regular lights.
In my area lots of trucks are lifted and nobody ever adjusts their lights to make sure they aren't blinding oncoming traffic.
You need to get a light bar and connect it to your high beams via relay
@@mendonesiac My friend and i did some tests with his stock brand new nissan pickup. With the high beams off his stock LEDs where enough to blind me when I passed him on a flat road and if I didn't know any better I would have though his high beams where on.
@@squidiz496 It has gotten ridiculous. I drive a '98 pickup and when a newer vehicle tailgates me at night there's a shadow in front of me and the road is lit up on both sides, completely overpowering my lights. It's really distracting.
If they ever crash or cause you to somehow, just remember they're always 100% at fault for illegally modified vehicles.
I'm an auto mechanic, and sealed beams are a nice occasional surprise. Most anything beats several hundred dollar plastic headlights that require removing the bumper to replace the bulb. The plastic covers/lenses are 100% guaranteed to need replacement at least once over the life of the car, and parts plus labor is going to be an extra $1,000. That's 1/25th of the purchase price of the car to replace the headlights one time.
If your car is in a garage most of the time, then it might go its lifetime without needing the lenses to be replaced. Since it doesn't get the UV light exposure when inside.
The covers can just be polished with fine abrasive compound and sprayed with UV resistant sealant, no need to replace the housing unless they're cracked or broken.
Logic is not allowed in the current world we live.
@@joshuagibson2520
⬆️ Yes, unfortunately, this
@@joshuagibson2520 When phones in 10 years became disposable jewels, cars might as well.
Is housing following the same trend too? Hope not but you never know...
We also used to require cars to have real, functional bumpers at similar heights. Now with automakers left to their own devices, anything that looks like a bumper on modern cars is merely a styling suggestion, and the height differences between cars and SUVs means that a minor parking lot bump can now end up causing thousands of dollars of damage -- especially if you end up breaking one of those frightfully expensive modern LED headlamps.
It’s because as crash technology advanced we realized that crumple zones and exerting as much force over the entire front of the car helped saved lives.
Dying in a 25-35 mph collision was a thing back in the day, now adays, thanks to seatbelts, crumple zones and airbags, you might walk out with nothing more than some cuts and bruises
@@TheBeeMan1994 Except for the fact that now that cars are safer, people drive like idiots far more often. It can be raining hard enough that you can't see more than 10-15 feet in front of your car and yet folks are still trying to drive 75+, knowing accidents aren't as severe as they used to be. It has truly been a double edged sword. I like to drive fast when it's possible and there aren't many others around still, but some people have completely lost that fear of being seriously injured or killed from doing stupid sh*t and just don't pay attention in general.
@@anthonyferguson7158 People will expand to fit any gap, including safety margins
@@anthonyferguson7158 ESC sadly has it's share in that too. Don't get me wrong, it is a good safety feature that has saved many lives. But when it became standard in cars i heard idiots say "nothing can happen, the car has ESC, no matter how fast i drive it can't crash or slip off the road". Nothing ever will be able to cope with idiots that do not understand that physics always win.
Even autonomous cars will not help, because they will find a way.
They may be hacked and "tuned" to give their resident idiot "an advantage" over others or do something it isn't supposed to.
My unpopular opinion is that driving a car needs to be more difficult again. So people focus on driving and learn how to drive properly.
@@nirfz Can't love your comment about stability control and many other safety features enough. It can save people from themselves quite often, but it's not intended to make any car an autonomous vehicle. It's there to give you more margin for error if you accidentally screw up. I'm not saying go completely back to the old days, but people did actually have to pay attention and use some skill when driving before, and they tended to be more cautious because of it. Folks just don't imagine what can go wrong at any time anymore and adjust their driving accordingly for conditions it seems. I'm kind of glad I still drive a 2000 Maxima. It has a 5 speed as well which tends to make me pay attention more just in general. The only real safety features are ABS and airbags, which for me is quite enough, and I know I'm actually the one controlling/driving the vehicle.
I never saw anything wrong with sealed beam headlights myself. They worked perfectly fine and are far cheaper to replace than other headlight designs. Since they were made of glass they didn't get cloudy over time like the plastic headlights did. Automakers should have never phased them out entirely.
Tbf though even if sealed beam headlights were still standard today let's be real they would phase out that glass and switch to crap plastic anyway
@@exoticcar5482 unless they use an existing manufacturer that makes them out of glass to supply them. Like Sylvania, General Electric, or Philips. Even so, the customer that buys such vehicles can always switch out the cheap plastic sealed beam headlights in favor of some good aftermarket glass ones. They're still going to be 50-state DOT legal. There are plenty of aftermarket manufacturers out there that make parts that are much better than stock.
also most components of a sealed beam headlight can be infinitely recycled, as they're mostly just plain metal and glass, almost no plastic waste to speak off.
Apart from the fact they were about as bright as a candle !
Funny when the headlights were all the same you could easily tell one make/model from another, now the headlights are different, but the cars all look about the same.
In German car manuals there is/was a section about how to modify the headlights for when you drive in a left-hand-side-driving country (e.g. England). As I remember it, you had to add some triangles of duct tape at the right places of the headlights to avoid glare for oncoming traffic. (I never drove my car to England, so for me this was a curiosity.)
Same thing in Portugal, in some cars, it was cheap to just buy the correct headlights, and not use the ugly tape.
We had the same instructions in Britain, but presumably mirrored. :) Most people prefered to either just paint the headlight yellow or buy a sort of stick-on lens though.
No longer applies. I drive in Europe regularly (UK driver + car) and the only legislation is that your lights must not dazzle other drivers. I've never once been stopped or flashed in my UK 2018 Renault Kadjar with unmodified headlights, nor on my previous vehilces.
@@TheDailyRant2023 And good for it. Ever since the chunnel it wouldn't make sense anymore, ey?
@@TheDailyRant2023 In the off chance he managed to read a comment left 2 weeks later, I looked up info about the stick on beam deflectors in case they could be a solution to the issues he is having with his RHD Nissan, and while doing so I found that LED headlights are suggested to have a flatter beam than halogen bulbs/headlight lenses, so this is likely why it's no longer required and probably why your relatively new Renault doesn't get flashed. I don't know that your car actually has LED headlights, but I seriously doubt you could drive on the right without altering the beam otherwise.
Most of the cars I grew up with had sealed beam headlights and they never got foggy or dull. They were always Crystal clear until they burned out.
Handily, because they had a crystal on the front.
I like this idea
👍🏻👍🏻👍🏻
Hi
Também
Good
Good
I distinctly remember going on vacations in France (Left hand drive cars) taking our British car (Right hand drive) in the 1960-70s. Not only were we required to apply a special clear paint to make them yellow to match French headlights, but we had to stick what was basically black tape over one quarter of each headlight to block the beam that would otherwise blind oncoming drivers. Apparently from another comment this is still happening but maybe no longer the yellow paint.
I remember my last car having a template in the manual and some small lines integrated into the lights themselves for aplying tape on the headlights for wrong-side-countries.
I think there used to be Clip-on covers, which were yellow and altered the dipped beam to be left hand side.
I'm not sure how well they worked.
Ah the joys of driving on the ‘wrong’ side of the road.
When coming to the UK with our car from Germany just 3 months ago, we were required to attach stickers called "Beam benders" in a specific location on both headlights. This way our light beams were bent (in the portion pointing into the wrong corner where they would just blind other drivers) to point the right way.
@@Konsumkruemelmonster were you informed of this when entering the country? I plan to do the same in December, but didn't know of this headlight incompatibility until 25 minutes and 20 seconds ago
for glass vs plastic it's related to the reflector technology. pre mid 90s, they used a smooth reflector and then used fresnel ridges on the glass lens to focus the beam pattern. mid 90s and later they had complex multifaceted reflectors which allowed clear polycarbonate lenses
Polycarbonate would still allow using Fresnel lenses though. As far as I know polycarbonate headlights are mandatory in the US for new designs due to being less fragile and much less dangerous in case of an accident with pedestrians.
The first Fresnel lenses I experienced were soft plastic magnifying glasses that were kind of weak, with the pattern lines interfering with whatever needed to be seen and magnifying.
One other advantage of sealed beams is that they get hot, which means they melt ice and snow to keep your lights clear in the winter. I have an old truck that I put retrofit LEDs in, but after getting caught in a nighttime ice storm and having my lights encased under a half inch of ice, I put the old halogens back in.
You should check out technology connections other video on traffic lights, Aparently the first led traffic lights had a similar issue so they added heating elements to them
@@spencerwarren8302 Living in Wisconsin I remember this happening. Fancy LEDs went up, first blizzard and all the lights facing the wind were plugged solid.
So you don't clear your vehicle of snow/ice before taking it on public roads? I'm sure everyone driving behind you really appreciates that.
@@transtubular Of course they clear their car. The issue, as mentioned by the commenter immediately above you, is that if you are driving during a blizzard, the snow sticks to LED bulbs and covers them while you are still driving - there's no built in way to keep them clear.
Old headlamps got hot enough that they would always melt the snow off. LEDs are both fortunately and unfortunately designed to be a lot more energy efficient, and therefore do not get hot during use - which is great most of the time, but really inconvenient when you need it most.
I believe he was saying that the lamps did not clear themselves of the ice and snow that accumulated on them while he was driving.
21:20 British/Irish people over 30 all know this. You used to see cars on the road, often with caravan, going to or from France - with "beam benders" installed. (Also, the cheap option: a triangle of black tape...) I don't know how common France as a holiday, and taking your car to get there, really was, but you only had to see it a few times before you asked Dad what that was.
And still today it's actually mandatory in the EU to have block off stickers on your lights if you come temporary in a country that drives on the opposite side from your origin country.
And if you import a car from the UK or Japan to a LHD country in the EU it's normally mandatory to install correct headlights (even for collectible cars). Cars do not pass the semi-annual road worthy control if the beam is not correct.
I hate it so much when I've got someone behind me with near-orange turn signals and bright bluish headlighs, mkaing me think I'm being lit up by police here. I work nights, so I drive in the dark both ways, and it's frustrating how some people's regular lights are as bright as many other's brights.
It's getting really bad, it feels like I'm constantly being dazzled when I drive around at night these days.
People in my area don't even know the difference between their brights and regular lights
They're clowns the lot of them. They would piss themselves driving a 100% pitch black road, yet they think they're cool flexing 5k lumens on a well-lit highway or city road. I really loathe them too.
@@kadenstimpson3167 There have been cars that have been taken to the shop because they accidentally turned on the high beams.
people in my area drive around with their brights on in daylight. and they drive with no lights at dusk or in the rain and fog.
I actually find it very difficult to drive at night now without polarized sunglasses because there are so many cars with lights that are way too bright.
I agree
Especially trucks. Damn American ones
Even worse as a cyclist. The adaptive high beams just ignore and blind you.
When in a car at night (as a passenger, I don't drive), even closing my eyes isn't enough with some cars. I'm autistic and have sensory issues because of it, so lights can be an issue on bad days in general (even just street lights can hurt my eyes sometimes) and those bright car lights even hurt with my eyes closed on those days, let alone if I had to keep them open in order to drive (good thing I don't have a license lmao, I'd absolutely get into an accident because of it)
you arr just concentratin on the bright Spot, their are NOT Brighter, just other Color and a smaller aperture than the Old big Dishes make you focus on the modern ones...
One of my favorite parts of Car & Driver magazine’s long term test fleet recaps is the maintenance cost section and, specifically, the cost of replacing a headlight housing. Most are upwards of $1700 now which is just crazy when you can get 90% of the performance for literally 1% of the cost with a seal beam setup.
But, realistically when are we changing the entire housings nowadays? Unless they get somehow damaged then yeah, but you usually only need to replace the bulb. Which is about the same if not cheaper than what an entire housing cost back then. Not to mention, most housings nowadays are not $1700 unless it’s an HID or Projector setup. Your basic honda civic halogen housings are like $150 for a pair.
You absolutely cannot get 90% of the performance from a sealed beam lamp though. Have you driven a modern car and a sealed-beam car back to back recently? Modern headlights are *miles* better in every way. Plus, with modern LED lamps the expensive part is the driver and the cooling solution, not the lamp chassis, so the cost advantage of a sealed-beam lamp disappears - the glass and reflector are the expensive part there, and thus achieve greater economy of scale in a sealed-beam setup.
@@6z0 I suspect their cost to replace the housing includes the labour, of which a fair bit is required to just get the assembly out on many late models.
@@LN997-i8x Labor? To take out 3 bolts holding the housing in place and fitting a new one in? Uhh, sure. That’s why you don’t pay people to do simple jobs on your car.
@@6z0 Many if not most new cars require you to remove the entire bumper skin to replace the headlight assembly, just like the Honda van in the video. It takes at least a half hour even for an experienced mechanic.
Basically like today, no established standards, and higher cost to consumers. I think we need to standardize more parts in the cars!
That would solve sooo many problems! As someone who uses an extremely common vehicle (in my part of the world anyway), I can tell you that the knowledge that any garage will likely have whatever replacement part I'm going to need is extremely reassuring, especially on longer road trips. Now, if it wasn't just a common model but things were standardised across ALL (or most) models... a dream! Also much more sustainable, I reckon.
Definitely. People are driving around with high beams on blinding others on LIGHTED ROADS. It’s insane.
If we could also standardize drivers, we could have highway heaven right here on Earth; but, alas, humans are hopelessly non-standardized, and getting crazier by the day.
We need investment in public transit
@@theexcaliburone5933 of course public transport should be the priority, but for some niches we probably have to find a private transport solution too
I remember having to replace a light, and the guy said "Round or square?" That was all you had to know about fixing a headlight. There are chemicals that can clean the oxidation off the plastic of lights, too.
A plastic light will stay clear a couple of months after polishing and then the fog is back with a vengeance
For some added info, one thing I left out of the video because my memory isn't _clear_ on it was that I'm pretty sure I wet sanded and polished the lights on that van first. They got better but I couldn't get them perfect, and that's why I bought the replacements. Plus, I was always looking for projects to do!
@@t0raneko I haven't tried it myself, but I have heard that applying a UV blocking clear coat of some kind is the trick to lengthening the life of a restored plastic headlight.
@@soldiersvejk2053 And even then, they don't last long. We used to do them to cars when I worked at Sam's club. I did it to my own car a couple times. You wet sand it a couple times with a finer sandpaper each time, dry it and apply the clear coat. Sunlight absolutely destroys the plastic headlights no matter what you do.
i use t-cut at least3 times a year ,works pretty well
My dad's old service trucks used sealed beams. They were the nicest thing in the world to replace, just a few quick turns of the screws and popped right out. Hell that's the only reason as a teenager I was able to change my own glow plugs in my old diesel. Realizing that stuff could be done with only a modicum of knowledge and practice was a huge confidence booster and resulted in a lot of care being applied to that car, more than it probably deserved honestly. Now if only we could do that with modern cars...
I think you'll find that changing the headlight bulb on most modern cars is even easier, if you take a moment to look think it through.
@@Elmojomonope, working on old vehicles is so much better especially if you go back to before fuel injection was common, you had so much more space to work in, minimum electrical stuff to deal with its pretty much all around more diy friendly. not to mention you can get really good gas mileage if you know how to tune your carb , 40mpg in an small block v8 and still be perfectly drivable good.
@@tomtom7955 How are you getting 40 mpg in a carbureted small block v8? I'm amazed when my efi 4.6 ford modular gets 28.
Wait till they start charging you a monthly fee just to _use_ your headlights.
@@tomtom7955 Oh, I totally agree! I had a '62 Chevy II Nova that was a dream to work on. I could actually sit on the fender inside the engine bay and work on the engine in the rain without getting wet. lol
I thought you meant just changing headlight bulbs. That part is actually easier in most modern vehicles, since you can just pop out the old element and insert a new one. :)
If anyone has fogged headlights, chrisfix has a great video on clearing them up. It boils down to sanding, polishing, and clear coating them. Much better than buying aftermarket headlights imo.
I HATE headlights on new cars now. They're all different and they're all extremely expensive because they make them overly elaborate.
And they blind oncoming traffic
That's how everything is nowdays. Little minute things are added to bump up the price, even if the things being added aren't wanted or useful.
@@gunnarlandin3258 yes
And going yellowish thanks to UV ageing too... My '86 bike, hell, even the '52 moped, have clearer lamps that my contemporary (circa, it's a 2009) car
(of course plastic headlights are good in weight reduction or even accidents, by not spreading glass shards everywhere, but I really hate the ageing yellow and the work you have to do to remove it)
I was hoping this was going to be a rant about modern headlight glare which makes driving at night particularly difficult for me. I’m glad to hear they are finally taking a look at it.
Amen, modern lights are so blinding one has to look away to the outside line to not be night blinded.
Dont celebrate allready. Adaptive/auto-off high beams are worse. They glare more, turn off to late and are extremely bright.
They are great for drivers, I have tested the adaptive LED-versions and they are cool. But I also get flashed by oncoming traffic - the headlights does not "adapt" fast enough and sometimes dont work like they should. A 1-2% error rate is still to high
In the last 5-10 years, driving at night has become really frustrating thanks to all the late models dazzingly you so easily. It's only getting worse as lights get brighter and those older ones start to fall out of alignment.
@@jmkhenka I've been driving a MK3 Ford Focus with auto-dipping headlights (HID) from 2015 to 2018, and the only real challenge for the autodipping was driving on the Autobahn, as the guard rails tend to hide the headlamps of oncoming traffic (especially trucks), while the drivers got to "enjoy" my highbeam. In 2018 this car was replaced by a MK4 Ford Focus with selective beam LED headlights, and that's working great on country roads. I might get flashed about once a month, but that's about the same rate i got flashed when i first started driving a car with (manual) HID headlights. Some folks are just overly sensible. Driving on the Autobahn is still a challenge for the selective beam, as long as the front camera can't look through the guard rails.
@@jmkhenka They aren't. Some LED systems are worse in detecting cars, but Audi and BMW as well as Polestar (with the 2) have great adaptive "permanent high beam" systems, that detect well and acting fast.
Also: Most drivers don't know to adjust the headlights for the loading of the vehicle, most LED and Xenons have auto-leveling. In germany, there are every day less cars with halogen and honestly, I'm glad that they go "out of fashion". Because what blinds me the MOST are poorly installed or adjusted halogen headlights. And since the sealed beam wasn't a big deal here where I live, H1, H4 and H7 are the most common lamp types so there can be many mistakes made replacing the bulb. Some LED systems are still a pain in the butt, but they are rare.
There was also a regulation on height of headlights from the ground that totally went out the window sometime in the past decade or so so now you have vehicles with their main headlights directly At eye level of other drivers
Definitely a pet peeve of mine! I drive a real car (i.e. a sedan), not an SUV or truck, and I've given up night driving because those new high-set lights blind me. Another thing I hate about modern car lights: they are far too blue (i.e. 'cool' white). A warmer, more yellow light gives far better vision than does a blue one. IMO, headlamps should be limited to about 3700 kelvin.
For real. I drive a pretty low and small car even for European standards, and i get blinded by so many crossovers and SUV's (especially when when they are behind me), not because they are doing anything wrong, but because their lights are directly at my eye level, burning my fucking eyes out.
This. I have learned hatred for the drivers of the big pickups purely because having them behind me for any more than a split second is literally painful.
Every new jeep.
@@21stcenturyozman20 SUV's I think are the real cars. The first cars had good ground clearance, they were taller, the driving position higher, you could drive with a hat on...😀
I wish they could better enforce proper aiming and maybe have a brightness limit, at least when facing other cars that you might be blinding. I'm a bit sensitive to light and driving at night is mostly fine for me (I basically never use my brights), but oncomming traffic is almost always blinding. especially with the large number of modern cars that have really bright lights for their regular low beams its really tough for me. I've even flashed my brights at people thinking they have their brights on only to be blinded back even worse. seriously, someone needs to figure this crap out.
It's mindboggling to read this in Australia. We have regulations on all of this including no red indicators
"I've even flashed my brights at people thinking they have their brights on only to be blinded back even worse."
This right here infuriates me so much, because I can't even be mad at the driver, it's the fault of our whole US automobile system, and aimless anger is the worst kind.
It's really bad. The lights are so bright that even if you can avoid staring into them and getting retina burn, you can see absolutely nothing in front of you until the car with a sun strapped to its front passes. only to be followed by another one doing the exact same thing.
We also have lots of giant pickup trucks and SUVs here with the lights mounted like a meter off the ground. it's really bad.
@@maoman4855 Used to be a wattage limit for lights; 55/60. Ìt may still apply, but new technologies on filaments allow more candlepower from the same wattage. Mandatory annual or every second year with checking headlight aiming would help.
A few years ago Dodge came out with real bright lights on their P/up trucks. Then for work, 500 pounds or so of tooling was put in the back, without adjusting the headlights down.
About 2015 Ford came out with the update that keeps all 4 headlights on all the time. Bad enough but then guys purchase brighter bulbs. Then you have the numbnutz that think 4 lane divided hiways were built so they do not have to dim their lights.
Then in Canada we have the DRLM, or Daytime Running Light Module. This energizes the hi beam filaments while in gear through a resistor. This is to make the vehicle more visible. GM has a light sensor that also turns on the running lights in the dark. This is a good feature as those on DRLM have headlights but no tail lights. How the dimwits do not realise they do not have tail lights on when the dash is not lit, is beyond me. And where are the police that do not pull people over for no tail lights or driving on hi beams all the time?
At least here in Europe there are limits. Initially on Wattage as someone mentioned before, which doesn´t do anything with modern full LED headlights of course (regulations are different here). When the first cars switched from halogen lights to Xenon lights years ago, at least around here it was necessary that the car had leveling sensors, to adjust the headlights level automatically. Same is valid for modern LED headlights. It does the same as the dial on older headlights where you had to turn the dial up with a load in the back to actually swing the headlights down. the manual approach of course almost never worked due to user ignorance. At the same time, I know a number of cars where, even with the sockets kind of keyed, it was possible to mount for example H4 bulbs upside down or crooked, which left you with a nice set of blinders as well. I am somewhat on the fence with older Xenons, but at least for LED it sems manufacturers got a grip on it and those never seem to blind me under normal circumstances.
All those regulations are by the way also the reason, why almost no legal Kits were around here in Europe (or especially Germany) which allowed you to retrofit Xenons or LEDs to your car. Just lately there are some LED replacements for H4 or H7 lamps which are legal with at least a number of vehicle models (list is growing over time).
Other than that, being extremely sensitive to blinding at night can indeed be a medical condition. In severe cases around here this may even prevent you from legally driving at night.
I used to work in a European lighting company (big one) and we had a recessed luminaire. At some point we decided to venture into US market. We needed to get this luminaire UL approved. In a nutshell I went from building luminaires to building tanks. Our "mostly plastic" designed was now mostly sheet metal. And the little plastic that did remain was 20..30% glass fiber. We payed a a lot of money for consultations and getting it approved. It felt like market obstructionisms at the time. In retrospect I think there might be more to UL then just milking money from Europeans 🤔
I worked for a US lighting manufacturer for a few years. All that sheet metal is for good reason as it dramatically reduces the possibility of building fires from luminaires. Although I do admit, it can be a little excessive and I detested running those tests in the lab.
I will say, as an American, that UL exists as one of the few times capitalism and the public good do actually mesh.
UL exists to save insurance companies money. Insurance doesn't want to pay out when a product burns down someone's house, randomly explodes, fails unexpectedly, or other such occurances.
The public doesn't want to be injured or killed.
The profit motive happens to line up with the public good in this case, which makes it a self-reinforcing cycle.
I hope they're doing more than "letting us have adaptive beam headlights." They still don't address the actual problem of people using too bright of beams, because they don't react fast enough when people go over bumps or come around corners quickly. They really need to look at how many lumens the headlights throw out and in what pattern - LEDs often end up blindingly bright in one spot because all the light is focused there.
Yeah came to say this. You always can tell the cars with adaptive beam headlights cause they’ll blind you for a split second when coming toward you. Makes driving much less pleasant for other road users.
There are also some LED brake lights out there that are *WAY TOO FRIGGIN' BRIGHT* . When I get stopped behind these obnoxious dolts at a stop light I have to lower my sun visor until they take their foot off the brake.
@@willmather4046 Well, i guess a normal human wont react fast enough either to not blind you..
What annoys me alot is when i meet cars with automatic high beams, and many of them turns them back on the second your headlights are not visible any more so you get a bright flash in the side window or right before it passes your A pillar. Adaptive headlights are actually really awsome i think, as you can drive with full lights behind other cars and still see alot out to the sides etc.
@@Alpejohn The whole point is that humans with old headlights wouldn't blind you either because they were simply using a reasonable bightness level.
@@RyanEglitis Yeah, but driving with old weak headlights sucks.. 😛 I cant stand weak headlights, but i guess that also depends on where and how you live. I drive alot in dark areas with alot of deers and stuff so i need good headlights..
Back in the 70's and 80's there was an aftermarket headlight made by Cebie called the Z-beam. It had a lens with a very sharp horizontal cut off so that the light went on the road rather than the trees and other drivers' eyes you got a much better view.
I've had cars with sharp cut offs like that. They are great on flat roads but suck where it's hilly or even on slight declines. You can't see what's ahead where the road goes level or up again.
@@kamX-rz4uy my old pickup I made room for two more regular sealed beams just for that reason. Those Z beams were awesome
rally boys used cebe ozkers in the 60's i still have 2 on my van from 1982
guess what they 100 watt halogen
not your 45/45 bulb. plus 1 100 watt spot 2 miles
and 2 broad spread for going round corners. still passed its mot
uk england gb
LOL, memories,, i had bought a pair of Cibie Z-beams,,, vast improvement at the time. :)
Modern day projector headlights have an almost totally clear cut off line.
Had a thought: The bloopers always remind me just how much care and dedication you put into these videos. The attention to detail really shows and the end result is really professional.
Wow, what an illuminating video! I'm dazzled by how you shine a light an old subject long lost down a deep and dark well of automotive history. You, sir, are truly brilliant!
it was very eloquent, however, he's just flat out wrong. he makes it seem like automakers and engineers were ignorant of a wonderful design but that's not the case at all. imagine replacing this technology and adding 3 to 500 dollars to he cost of a $7,000 sedan... and doubling the space on store shelves after you magically manufactured millions of bulbs and distributed them magically as well. the plastics technology we had in the 1970s would have probably yellowed before the end of the model year rather than the three to five years they do now in modern vehicles.
when a rock breaks your headlight in 1976, it cost you $4. in 2016 it costs you $500+. in my 1994 Lincoln it was 1200 for one side. but hey good thing the bulbs themselves are only 35 bucks instead of $4 like in the 70s. oh, wait..
I see what you did there. Have a like.
@@faradaysage15 You seem to have missed his entire point. The things he's talking about were done very successfully in other countries without issue. Not to mention, writing a long comment to complain about the video in a reply to someone that was just complimenting the creator is just rude.
I grew up down the street from osram sylvania, it was a huge factory in central falls, RI. Drive by at lunchtime and there would be 50 or 60 people outside. Closed down about 15 years ago. Started getting torn down a few weeks ago, makes me sad to see my state change like this.
I miss all the dairy farms that populated the NW WI rural landscape. They're gone and farmers just sell to ethonal .... I'm sad all day every day
The sealed beam sylvania silverstars I have in my 84 Corolla are from 2006 and were made in the USA. All the new silverstars I've put in anybodys cars burn out after just under a year. :(
I remember in the Army we had a bunch of vehicles which still used the sealed beam type. Hummers, trucks, even tanks. They performed well, were durable, and fairly easy to replace. Nowadays those older halogen sealed beams are getting replaced with LED headlights which are also circular and fit in the same spot. Honestly, I think the older halogen beams look better at night.
ok
I cant stand daylight color at night and so i hate LEDs! I like halogen for soft white color! This is not considered for some reason with modern LEDs.
The problem with LEDs as well is they are supposed to last for 10,000 Hours yet barely reach that mark due to Driver Failure or one dead LED. These issues can be fixed, but why would you wanna waste time fixing a fucking
@@Vinnay94 Why would anything that the driver does shorten the life of an LED headlight? If you mean improper heat sink installation, the blame would be on the installer, who may not be the driver of the vehicle.
Dude....I have to give you props once more because you are one of very few TH-cam channels that actually are a joy to watch because I actually get to learn something. I wish more people tried doing this, it would help humanity out immensely. Keep up the great work and thank you.
It really shows how progress only goes backwards!
Yeah he's got the gift and many recognize. His amber rear turn signal episode is legendary in the car community.
Shut down Big Tech with their culture-destroying algorithms and things would improve, literally across entire society. Oh, and eliminate Fed department of education.
My old truck uses the quad square lights. I also have an old 1992 Geo Prizm, which surprisingly has glass styled headlamps. They’ve never faded after 31 years.
It’s almost like the plastic ones they make today last just long enough for the car payment to run out…
I remember when the smaller round headlights first came out , the auto makers claimed that with the small lights they could lower the hoods on cars , of course the first thing the auto makers did was stack the two smaller lights on top of themselves , I think that started with the 1957 Rambler
AMC rules!
Stylists always win out b/c styling is what sells cars. It's the only reason the new (2000s) Beetle ever sold at all. The mechanical design was completely subservient to the shape. Replacing the alternator started with removing the entire front fascia/bumper cover, but ladies thought the car was cute.
Car makers see headlights as styling cues first and night vision aids second. Some new models are ugly simply b/c they have to be different and the stylists ran out of good looking differents. Good functioning different, not their concern.
Resulting in better fuel-economy for cars other than the Rambler. BTW, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration is required to regulate the fuel economy of new motor vehicles as well as safety.
12:42 imagine you’re in 1984 and you finally expect a giant leap for automotive technology and the first car that comes out is the Lincoln Continental
Believe it or else, Ford had it goin' on in the early 80's. The Mustang 5.0, Thunderbird turbo, and Mk VII LSC were big friggin deals back then.
Sincerely,
Dude who was really into cars in the early 80s
@@rwright2046 fine I believe you - I’ll admit I don’t know a lot about this specific car I just thought the joke sounded funny.
Which American car from the mid eighties would you recommend looking into?
@@Halarue I had to think about it for a bit. If you want to understand the US car industry in the early 80s, the place to start is…the 1982 Cadillac Cimarron! It was GM’s answer to the BMW 3 series and it was terrible. Once you see how bad American cars could be, you can appreciate the ones that didn’t suck.
The Mustang SVO was also supposed to debut with flush headlights but the new regulations hadn't been approved yet, so it came out with that weird design
@@rwright2046 uhg, the Cimmaron, that car represented EVERYTHING wrong with General Motors.
Another benifit of these headlights was you could actually see the oncoming cars turn signal as it wasnt tiny and in the same unit which was designed for looks and not function
that's something that annoys me too. I understand that making a light module makes assembling the vehicle easier, but putting the turn signal right next to the headlight means that it is much harder to see the turn signal when the headlight is on. I miss the days when turn signals were easily visible from the side too.
The oncoming car usually isn’t using its turn signal anymore because nobody seems to bother… Annoying!
I FUCKING HATE THIS SO MUCH!
Aussie here, as a driver, and also someone who helped around my uncles mechanic shop, I fucking hate most new car headlight clusters with a passion. SO many cars will have indicators that are hard to see from a certain angle, or in the dark are overwhelmed by the headlights, and it drives me up the wall. Not to mention that so many new cars have icredibly painful to swap lights, its maddenning. I like the flexibility of modern standardised incandencent and halogens, however some manufacturerers make it way to hard to replace. My own car, which is a 2005 Honda Accord Euro, its a lovely thing and as cars go pretty no nonsense, with a bit of luxury. But in order to replace the parking lights, you have to go in through the wheel well. And not to mention that the fog lights are held in with a slot in tab and a single pastic push in clip, which fell out on mine and I was driving around with a fog light that was hanging out of its socket for a while before I realised!
And then you have modern LEDs, which so often are dazzlingly bright, and especially on larger cars like SUVs, are often right at my eyeline in my sedan. And, Leds arent a self contained replaceable part. I'd love if we had some standardised led bulbs or whatever, like we do with older incandescent lights, but we dont, as far as im aware. If any light goes out in my car, its generally super easy to replace. Brake lights, indicators, cabin lights, easy and easy to find in stores. A set of bulbs cost like maybe 10 bucks and I keep some in my car just in case.
So many cars would come in with rear brake strips that had like one or two led's out, and once you lose enough ya gotta replace the whole bloody thing, and it costs a fortune. Same with fancy modern LED headlight clusters. If car makers started using more standardised LED parts id be hyped, but no. AND yellowing plastic, and all that good stuff.
Okay rant over its just annoying lmao
There are cars in the UK now that when the signal is flashing the headlight on that side actually turns off.
@@markylon That's pretty common here in the US too. I think people just aren't noticing them.
This was a far better design than a $1500 headlight housing that takes 3 hours to replace.
You'll be real upset when I tell you it takes me 30 minutes and I just park it outside.
I can change the bulbs in my truck in like 30 seconds each
On my Lincoln I have to remove the entire assembly. And replacing the side marker bulb is excruciating.
You chose to buy it.
My Lexus RX headlight is $2,600.
Have a look in the handbook for your small car. Some are designed to concert the shutter by turning the shutter. Failing that you could mask the offset with tape. We used to do that in the Uk trawling to mainland Europe. Great video really enjoyed it.
You can buy stick on lenses to bend the beam the other way.
I wish there were a standard today. Regular headlights are the kinda yellow tint that they always been. Bright are a slight blue tint so you know if someone is just not turning off their brights when oncoming. Regular lights can only be a certain brightness.
A thought on LEDs;
I feel like a significant issue with large LED lights (headlights, street lamps, etc.) is that they are too _intense_, rather than necessarily too _bright_. I've seen many street lamps that have the same 'blinding to look at' quality that LED headlights tend to have, but that give barely half the illumination on the ground as the old sodium lamp. Where in the past, very bright incandescent, halogen or various discharge lamps would tend to have very large filaments/light-emity-bits, modern LEDS can get absurdly high brightness out of often a single diode (or COB config) that is millimeters wide. Then you put that in a normal reflector, and you get a tiny spot of crazy bright light. It would be nice to see new reflectors and maybe diffusers used in LED lights to help mitigate that.
It would also be real great if people would stop taking their lifted trucks with headlights 4 feet off the ground and aimed dead flat and adding giant fog lights that are actually high beams, but that's a different issue...
Hah. Around here the big ticket (unfortunately not in the sense of a citation) is using off-road light bars as headlights. Sometimes more than one, and always flood pattern.
Yes, exactly this!
Old headlights are much better since they rarely had the surface brightness to blind you. Modern projector lamps and LEDs have far, far too much surface brightness, even though they may well be within specs (legal limits) for total light output.
"It would also be real great if people would stop taking their lifted trucks with headlights 4 feet off the ground and aimed dead flat "
Exactly at rear-view-mirror height, and thus shining directly into your soul
I've noticed lately that a lot more attention is being given to LED optics. A lot of LED lamps that used to always be as you describe are now being fitted with frosted diffusers and real optics rather than slapped-together lenses or -even worse - no lens at all, just a clear cover.
@@awo1fman that’s great!
I'm sure there's a whole other video in this, but as a lot of people have alluded to with the complaints about lights being too bright, there's another whole area that we're behind on. From what I've heard, standard for the amount of light headlights put out was designed for filament bulbs so it underweights bluer wavelengths relative to what the human eye sees, and that means that LED headlights are putting out more photons in visible wavelengths than older designs which are considered equally bright according to the standard, and also bluer LED lamps are worse for allowing your eyes to become adapted to the darkness outside of the beam than the more yellow/orange incandescent and halogen bulbs.
Not really. Candela is candela regardless of color (it is wavelength weighted based on the eye response curve). The regs are written with mins and maxes specified in candela.
@@brettspencer-curran8269 No, that is completely wrong. Wavelength matters a LOT. Red and amber have much less effect on night vision than blue and violet light with the same candela. That's why the Army used to issue their flashlights with red and amber add-on lenses. The shorter the wavelength, the more it hurts your night vision.
@@Bacteriophagebs Yep, the difference is only in how the light affects night vision, not really in number of photons.
@@Bacteriophagebs you are talking about scotopic response curve. Yes that is more sensitive to blue light but in general with modern headlights you are halfway into the photopic region of the human eye response so you aren't nearly as sensitive to blue as you think.
Another excellent video.
As a side note I’m pretty entertained by the presence of old Soviet cars in this video.
I saw the Volga, Chaika, and the GAZ-53 truck.
зил 130, а не gaz-53
And a Chevy with Slovenian license plates 🤣
If you ever run into the oxidation again, I would try and find a local detailer who can polish them. The plastic is pretty thick so you can do it a few times if needed, but they can be polished up to the point they look new!
Off deep woods works pretty good as well 😁
Also critical to seal them after polishing.
My 26 YO car has small lenses that are easy to keep polished and clear. About every 6 months do the final polish stage.
You need to make sure you apply a UV protective sealant after polishing them, else they will go foggy again within a couple months. Even then it will only last 1-3 years depending on how much sun you get.
You can polish out the clouding, but the yellowing runs all the way through the plastic so its there to stay.
I may be biased since I dont have a big issue seeing in the dark. But the "responsive closed loop headlight systems" & their accompanying insanely bright harsh white LEDs are the BANE of my existence. The systems respond to slow so your just getting blasted by super bright high beam all the time for a split second and or the other car just decides your not an object too worry about... but the stop sight reflecting it's own lights back is :/
Likewise. I don't mind night driving. I mind the ridiculously bright blue LED lights.
The truth is that too many people have too many competing opinions and they drown out the experts. Classic cars had these lights as "limitations" and are still classics. It surprises most people when you point this bit of trivia out. I don't think we should go completely backward, but there's issues today with style over safety and I think everyone knows it.
The auto parts stores in UK now have to stock a huge range of vehicle bulbs, resulting in the individual cost of a bulb being much higher than if there were fewer designs.
Despite the numbers available, I was unable to get replacement bulbs for my US imports (Chevrolet Astro and HHR) as they were yet another design. If only the World had stuck with Sealed Beam lights, I would have been very pleased.
I used to stock up with replacement bulbs during our visits to the USA. My wife never objected to a trip to Florida to get some auto bulbs at Walmarts !
Possibly one further drawback with the plastic headlights. To change a bulb on the HHR, the front wheel had to come off and the arch liner dropped- try doing that at night.
"If only the World had stuck with Sealed Beam lights, I would have been very pleased." On the other hand, one can be thankful for "improvements" which never caught on like Michelin metric wheels and tyres. 🙂
@@TassieLorenzoOh those stupid TRX tires. Id rather work with dry, cracked, over pressurized tires on some Ford two piece Widowmaker wheels than let tires become even more annoying
Its a wild concept to me that you imported an HHR
@@hquic I didn't import the HHR, but my wife had located one for sale on eBay in North Wales. We had both driven a rental HHR on our previous visit to the US and like it so much we just had to get one of our own. It was a lovely comfortable car.
Me and my dad had to replace the right headlamp bulb on the Chevrolet HHR around 2 years ago when the right headlamp burned out, and let me tell you, it was a difficult chore to remove the liner from the right wheel well, find the bulb, remove it, replace it in a way that doesn't run the risk of touching the glass and shortening the life of the bulb, and we didn't know what to do that the car got jacked at the wrong place and damaged the radiator, which caused the vehicle to leak coolant and overheat, and the vehicle needed a whole new radiator.
I was in Okinawa when they went from right-side driving to left-side driving. There were ad campaigns the likes you've never seen before and when people got their headlights fixed before the switchover date (which was required by law), you had to keep a piece of weather-resistant tape across the middle to be removed at the right time.
This is a thing that happened in the modern era? Wow, I had no idea... I really can't imagine why but I'm sure there was a very good reason and not just some anti-American sentiment.
They switched? I assumed that was just how they started. Why would you switch to the less common practice?
Sweden did the opposite. Switched from left side to right. Maybe in the 1970's? The weird thing is that their Saabs and Volvo's always had steering on the left.
I quote: ”With the Vienna Convention on Road Traffic entering into force in 1977, and earlier 1949 Geneva Convention on Road Traffic, both requiring member states to have a uniform traffic direction throughout the country, post-occupation Japan was obliged to bring Okinawa in line with the rest of the country and international practice. Owing to assorted bureaucratic wrinkles, however, it was not until 1978 that Okinawa finally made the switch to left-hand drive.”
And to be fair it would be pretty strange if only one small island would drive on the other side than the rest of the country. And expensive since they would need to have different cars (or at least headlights) than the rest of the country.
I definitely prefer the look of the yellowish classic headlights opposed to the bright cool white headlights you see often nowadays. Also the yellowish ones apparently help to see when its raining
The blue ones are blinding to oncoming traffic and they suppress melatonin. Great for driving an all nighter but terrible for your sleep if you hop into the car to drive and get something real quick because it just reset your melatonin clock. Don't worry! They have drugs for that! And drugs to "fix" the problems those drugs caused. It all works together! 🤪👍
It really does! When going above 4000K, you start to lose visibility and it becomes more challenging to see during dark and stormy weathers.
That's why some people use yellow fog lights
Yea it's called "warm" and "cool" lighting I'll leave you to determine which is which lol
It's also blinds the others more easily.
Everytime I drive rural roads and theres incoming (and behind me as well) white headlights it's horrible even if they are on low. This shit should be banned even if they look "cool"
That two cars you showing during the video- old soviet Gaz and Zil- actually have headlights that contain replaceable light bulb. You can unscrew the front glass and just install a new bulb, or even there are cheap LED lights that fit in there.
The weirdest thing that those are incompatible with the headlight of the video (sorry for the pun) being Soviet cars with different regulations. I know that because I tried retrofitting US light from eBay on my ГАЗ once.
Another thing about modern headlights, they put off no heat and when driving in the snow are susceptible to becoming clogged with snow or ice that sticks to them making it much harder to see. This is a minor problem that sealed beams never had.
No heat but they yellow thanks to our friend UV
No heat from the 55W halogen bulb?
@@fivish he said modern.
LED traffic signals or retrofits with an LED bulb have the same issue. My city still had halogen traffic signals from 1972 in use at the intersection nearest me up through 2017. The VERY SECOND they switched to LED signals those suckers had burned out blank spots on the "bulbs" within a month of use, and that winter they were full of snow and ice making them totally unviewable. Nobody could see them. Gotta love how modern society takes something that works and has no issues, throws it away because OOOH COMPUTERS and fucks everything up just for the sake of fucking it up.
@@HuskyGamersUNITEAlex made a video on led traffic signals.
There is one thing that should be noted, that automatic Highbeams are not the best solution. Here in Europe i have a Mazda 3 2019. It has automatic Highbeams. Sometimes they need rather long (up to 3 seconds) to adapt. Its rare, but in this cases the other driver gets fully blinded and putting them manually would be faster in this case. Also when im driving on the Autobahn, the middle crash barrier lets light through but blocks the camera to notice other cars in the opposite lane. So the car sets the highbeam on full and does not except the opposite traffic because the camera cant detect the oncoming light. This will blind the traffic sometimes. I usually notice that and disable the automatic highbeam when on the autobahn. But many casual driver probably never would disable it or care.
On a different note, it would be interesting to hear your opinion about the german TÜV. This organisation checks if the cars are roadworthy or have in this case highbeams that work and are correctly set up. It probably the thing you wish for in America to have standardised rules for roadsafety.
How does it deal with fog?
@@benholroyd5221 Fog, like after heavy drinking.
It takes 2 painkillers and a big glass of water.
This tech, it is infantile phase. So many recalls on it for Fords. Flashing brights like mad!
@@benholroyd5221 It not works if you make on your back fog light or your front fog lights. Older versions go on/off after automatic not "see" fog. It is same with raining sensory effects if suddenly fall many water on it. The driver of the car should not loose his/her brain at home after start the car! The option is to make off the automatic in some situations!
The US afaik has checks like TÜV (HU actually ;)) in some states.
TÜV is a large general testing organization similar to the UL. They even seem to have an office in south east Asia testing Chinese products.
The most amazing thing about those old lights is there temperature resilience, not even jet fuel can melt sealed beams
Or steel beams.
@@alpham777 Let me guess, 9/11 truther? They didn't need to be melted, just weakened. Ever see someone cut through rope to free themselves in a movie? They don't cut them all the way through, just far enough to pull free. Plus, the beams in the twin towers were set on trusses, and those were what needed to fail, not the entire beam.
bravo, Vince
Ha
Too soon
The first time I learned about sealed beams was when one of the low beams on my 1984 Subaru burned out. I was dismayed to find out I had to replace the whole lamp and thought I'd have to source some obscure thing similar to replacing a modern headlight, but after getting one at Canadian Tire for $15 I was definitely convinced of their benefits.
If you're not watching these videos with the subtitles turned, you're doing it wrong.
-bless this man's heart, he even does his own custom subtitles for his bloopers and goes to the trouble to add little Easter eggs to them
Part of the reason the light pattern was better with the sealed beams is the lenses were actually somewhat complex fresnel lenses. The small difference in placement of the low and high filaments were enough to allow those to project totally differently. Most modern headlights are just smooth, clear plastic. THose can be polished to majorly improve the look and function by the way, though if the damage goes too deep, then they obviously need replacing. Of course it's a moot point really since by the time a modern car is 10 years old, you can't get parts, especially for the electronics.
I've never had a car less than 10 years old and I've never had trouble getting any kind of parts.
@@MarkLeinhos Yeah, my CR-V is a 2007 model -- no parts problems so far.
I'm more concerned with that guy's Uncle-Granny hair style.
Uh, I'm still getting parts for a 20 year old Ford Focus just fine.
What 10 year old car are you driving that you can't find parts for?
When I lived in Britain it was common to get a 'sticker kit' to apply to headlights when driving 'on the continent'
It prevented dazzling oncoming drivers.
It may not solve your 'unable to see' but would prevent people 'flashing' at you on low beam
The aiming thing at the end reminded me of the issues I had driving at night in the US Virgin Islands, where they still for some reason drive on the wrong side of the road, but pretty much all of their cars are designed for right-hand drive, so headlights spend most of their energy blinding oncoming traffic rather than illuminating what you need them to. Truly the worst of both worlds.
I fully agree with regulating headlights tbh. This was a much better solution than modern bulbs. I've even seen a Chevy Bolt (which isn't a remotely old car) with both LED taillights dead, and using the backup taillights on the bumper. Regulation leads to consistency.
This video was very fun to watch. Might I suggest a part two that goes into the technology of the reflectors and lenses and how they've changed over the years? We went from headlights with little lines in them to completely clear ones with no lines at all!
That's actually very good idea, I'd definitely watch it
I love that you show Soviet era cars and trucks 😀
Still the old lights were kinda cool and in particular yellow fog lights do work. Modern LEDs are a menace to the eyes
I was thinking “What's that car that looks a lot like a Volga”, and sure enough I rewind and see the GAZ logo.
Dunno what it has to do with US regulations, though.
Volga doesn't have sealed lights though, they can be almost fully disassembled
Soviet cars always used traditional light bulbs. Same thing in Poland. Polish "Warszawa" car was in fact a copy of Russian Pobieda. It came with 170mm headlights. That headlight was used on Pobieda, Gaz 69, Uaz, Moskvich, Syrena, Żuk, Nysa, Star, Jelcz, Tarpan. And Czechoslovakian Skoda 1000MB/100? You could fit it with Polish "Zelmot" headlights too. Everything was standarized.
@@asanisi Im guessing if those cars were ever imported, they prolly had to use the same headlight design.
I recently bought a 1969 Morris Minor 1000 that has these lights! I loved that they were glass and I was immediately surprised by how impressive their performance was, ESPECIALLY the high beam (which is operated with a button pushed by your foot). This video sums up my experience quite well.
I love your wit and sense of humor I learn and laugh a lot in all of your videos. Thank you!😂
Let me just thank you for subtitling the bloopers so expertly. This is the sort of bonus content I stay on for
A similar law existed in France where all headlamps were YELLOW to avoid glare until 1993. Search for "Selective yellow" in the wiki.
Nope, not for glare. It was to identify non French cars at night in times of war.
You know, so you can strafe them. 🇩🇪
The modern lamps yellow with time. XD
@@reggiebuffat Huh? I don't buy that. It sounds more like someone might have taken advantage of the distinctive color during war. When was the regulation put in place?
you missed the 'in fog' bit - the yellow minimises scatter, thats why fog lamps are generally yellow too
I don't understand how nobody sees anything wrong with the new led headlights. I work night shift so going and coming home from work in the dark. I'm pretty much blind on the commute because of oncoming traffic, and just waiting for the accident to happen.
You're not alone. I have to use my sun visor at an angle to block the entire oncoming lane of traffic. Thank god there's a highway divider for most of my commute. But I guess we're just supposed to take the bus if we can't deal, because it's gonna keep getting worse.
The LED lights on my 2nd gen Volt are so bright, I pretty much never use my high beams. I don't need to.
If we have to live with led lights, can we at least make defusers mandatory please?
The CCT (color temperature) of the LEDs has much to do with eye strain and fatigue. The harsh cold light coming from most headlights just sucks. It should be around 3000K or below to be less straining to other drivers
I'd suggest getting your eyes tested. Your ability to adjust to bright and dark conditions does slow with age, it is not unusual for you to notice this whilst driving.
If you have an accident because you are having issues seeing at night, that's on you.
LED headlights are fantastic in my opinion. Better colour temperature, better at lighting the road ahead, automatic levelling, auto dipping/adaptive beam patterns, minimal light spill into opposing traffic, etc.
Adding this as a separate comment, you can buff off the oxidation on those plastic headlight assemblies. I use the turtle buffing compound with a cheap second hand orbital buffer. Then wipe it off. They get cleared up very nicely after that.
Yeah it’s just something you gotta do with those every once in a while
I love how even the bloopers have subtitles according to them. Always a great addition and awesome for people who English is not his first language.
I thought this video would be about the particular optics involved in making sure all street-legal cars don't glare pedestrians and oncoming traffic. Now I kinda hope there's a video about that =)
I'd actually really like to know about that because I kind of want to design my own bike lights that light up the road well without dazzling drivers. Thinking I'll use bits of fresnel lens to reflect light from a big COB into the correct places.
@@charleslambert3368 Look at StVzo (not sure how it's abbreviated) regulations. The Germans have made it a science. You can get approved bike lights easily that cast plenty of light on the road with a cutoff.
Wait for it. We’re gonna dive in laser disc style!
It would be a pretty short video because nowadays they just...don't care. Blind everyone, driver included, with your tiny suns!
One thing I wish the DOT would regulate: Pulse-Width Modulation flicker in taillights. Have you ever moved your eyes at night and seen somebody's taillight break down into a trail of dots, instead of a blur? Yeah, that's PWM flickering. It's horribly distracting!
Even those LED *headlights* in the video show some evidence of flicker. The moving banding in those shots comes from an interaction of camera frame rate and LED flicker rate.
Thank God, another person in the world who’s qualified to regulate these idiotic things! Some do very well - modulating at well beyond what the human eye can register - or at the very least, at a rate higher than the decay rate of the LEDs being used.
There are a few cars (American makes, obviously, because the garbage always has been) that flicker at such a low rate that if you move your eyes _AT ALL_ you lose the ability to even register where the car in front of you is on the road! Clearly the “invisible hand of a free market” does not fix idiotic problems that never should have made it out of a design studio.
That's more of a physics issue than a regulatory one. Not much to be done about it, sorry.
I god I hate those. Especially the onea that have some Chris Nolan 24 hz movie flicker rate but also add the indicators as arrows or chevrons around the light. One of those comes up behind you at night and bam your mirrors are gone, you can't glance over your shoulder to see if they're going left or right and all the lane markings with reflective paint are now shimmering at you. I honestly trying these should be a law that lets you shoot out lights like that.
Yes, this drives me crazy! The worst are Cadillac SUVs, at least ones from 4-5 years ago.
The problem is we are a minority. Most people cannot see this. If you do see this, you surely also see with white of TV projectors split into a rainbow too. Terribly annoying.
@@Elmojomo It is not a physics issue. If an LED is provided a constant voltage, it will produce a constant light. The flickering is from the power supply conversion, in homes from 120VAC and in cars from 12VDC. Both are too high voltage for LEDs to operate. It is “solvable” if desired, but likely at some cost.
Most modern cars nowadays require the removal of the front bumper assembly to replace them. Depending on your car...you can easily spend over 150.00 on a headlight or blinker replacement for a 12.00 bulb and a minimum of 1 hour just to remove the facia.
Those old school lights had a chrome ring and 3 screws and usually took less than 10 minutes for a repair when you did it yourself. Costing you 4 to 10.00 in the 80s.
I have a 2004 Honda Accord and you have to disassemble the wheel well to get to the headlight and change the bulb. I had to have it professionally done and I am very handy.
@kerrywsmyth I totally understand.
It's one of the reasons I got out of the automotive industry.
They are designing things to be complicated, so 90 percent of all people can't do a simple repair.
There was a push to use polarized lights that would have eliminated glare from on-coming traffic and made the roads much safer at night. The car companies squashed the idea in 1947 because of lack of economic incentive. Unfortunately it wasn't mandated by law, which was how we implemented seat belts.
Well, the problem with polarized light is that you're instantly halving the output.
@@nikolaus2688 Well, the problem with that being the problem is who cares.
I can't argue with any of the points in this video but I also think there should be a return to these, purely for the reason that they look so friendly, while car headlights these days all look so... mean.
Cannot agree with that. I take a modern set of LED headlights which give me great light and visibility any time over old halogens. Also the old halogens if not adjusted right, or halogen bulbs not mounted right have a tendency to be more blinding than newer (self leveling) styles. I am somewhat on the edge with those Xenon lights that seem to have fallen out of fashion completely. I theory at least around here those are suposed to be self leveling because they are brighter, but it seems among those there indeed had been some quite blinding designs. Never noticed being blinded by a set of LED headlights so far (unless the driver forgot to turn the high beams of).
@@alexanderkupke920 *theorize, not theory
My mini is very friendly 😊
Have you seen those autonomous cars with googly eyes? Maybe that will get us back to friendly looking cars. I think those cars should have a smile or a grin between the eyes for good measure.
People would still cover the tops of the round lights to make their cars _A N G E R Y_ like every single jeep owner.
Don't get too excited for adaptive headlights, Being randomly blinded because the giant suv in the other lane has decided you don't exist anymore is honestly worse then them just having brights on
Here Here!
This issue affects pedestrians, too!
To make adaptive light good is not a easy task, I dont dispute they dont exist. They are good in expensive cars, in midrange as cost cutting take place they are terrible. Not for driver, so he keeps using them to make everyone else suffer
I meet a Tesla every morning with that fault. The idiot haven't cared to have it fixed for almost a year yet. Just turn on highbeams now when he comes. Overall automatic headlight is shit for oncoming traffic and they do not work. Should never been allowed.
True. This is extremely funny as a truck driver on a highway when the modern LED-equipped car in the opposite direction doesn't "see" your headlights and keeps blinding you as if you didn't exist.
There are not many people I watch that I would compliment their captions. You’re videos are a great exception to that. Love these videos and your captions, especially at the end of the video
Great video. In the UK we have to fit little conversion kits if we drive our cars across to France due to the light spread issue. Thanks for a nice detailed dive into a neat topic.
Yeha this fact is well known to Uk drivers who ventured into France, and had to stick those converters on the headlights. My VW with led headlights has an option in the menus to convert the lights so no need for the converters
@@monishbiswas1966 is it called a French mode?
@@dustojnikhummer Audi calls it "travel mode", so I guess in VW it's the same.
@@dustojnikhummer it’s a German car, so would be called British Mode😎
No it’s named ‘adapt for driving on the right’ or something like that.
Some cars have a symmetrical beam pattern (like the mk4 mx5), so you can just go.
I've always wondered what those knobby bits were for. Thank you so much for explaining that, my perplexed 13 year old self taking apart an old light would have been happy to know what they were.
14:06 So those LEDs shine into pedestrians' eyes regardless. LED car lights (front and rear) make it positively dangerous to be outdoors at night, because there's always someone driving along the road I'm walking beside, and those LEDs are so bright and so intense, they make it near impossible to see anything else.
Then don't look at their headlights and you won't be blinded.
Yup. They blind the piss out of me, too.
Personally, when I'm a pedestrian I would rather the car's brights be on me so that the driver has a better chance of seeing me.
@@milfordcivic6755 It isn't just the headlights. It's EVERY light. I get blinded by people's blinkers all the fucking time and it's infuriating. These modern cars with all LED lighting are atrocious to be around at night I don't care which direction it's facing relative to you.
@@milfordcivic6755 Yeah! Why look FORWARD when you're driving?
6v systems (and headlights) were briefly mentioned. If you have never experienced 6v headlights, imagine driving your car with a wax candle sitting in front of an aluminum pie plate functioning as the the headlights. That is about how bright they were.
people did not drive at night back then, so it wasnt necessary. and i have driven 6v cars before, the lights are perfectly fine. get your eyes checked.
@@HuskyGamersUNITE sounds like they put 12v headlights into the 6v socket.. quarter the power output.
My DeLorean used to be fitted with non halogen sealed beams. I'm not sure how old they were but the square glass bulb literally was the bulb. The filament was exposed in the bulb. One day a rock punched a hole in the face of the bulb and I noticed it before turning on the lights. Needless to say I watched that bulb burn out within 10 seconds right in front of me. I wish I had recorded it.
Thank you furry_DeLorean I hope your DeLorean isn't wearing a custom fursuit
That is how all the pre-halogen "sealed beam" lamps are. The lens/reflector was the actual environment that the filament lived in, usually with a small metal "shade" in from of the filaments to reduce glare. It wasn't until the halogen era that there was a separate capsule inside the lens/reflector.
@@thekingoffailure9967 I’m getting one of the 88 new electric DeLoreans, I’ll make a fursuit for it that matches mine ❤
@@abpsd73 That little "shade" isn't actually specifically to reduce glare, although it does have that benefit. It's actually a reflector that forces all of the light to go exactly where you want it - toward the main, focusing reflector - instead of spraying out at all random angles.
"We're sending you back to the fur-ture!"
Yes, I remember going into an auto parts store when I first started to drive in the early 90's. Even though manufacturers could move away from them by then, most cars on the road still had sealed beams. If your headlight was out, there were only two questions you needed to answer: rectangle or round, and 2 or 4? And since two square was by far the most popular option by then, they often had a giant pile of them in the front of the store. It did tend to make getting a new headlight pretty easy.
GM did some weird things back then. Some of their cars (Camaro, for example) had half-height sealed beams. Late 80s/early 90s trucks used squares slightly smaller than standard.
Not today! When a car model has different headlights every year of production. Similar, but just slightly changed so that they're not interchangeable
For 3 bucks
I have always thought we should go back to having some more regulation on how bright headlights can be(at least for the low beams, even though many people just ride around with their high beams on all the time.) the new LED headlights are far too bright(or are pointed too high) for other drivers. Yes you can see for miles with just your low beams but nobody in the opposite lane can see more than a few feet in front of their vehicle. And it seems to be the same people that never use turn signals that will leave their high beams on when passing people heading in the opposite direction with no concern about how dangerous it could potentially be. And don’t get me started on the people that have LED light bars that they run all the time, if more people would give some more consideration to everyone else on the road I’m convinced we would have far fewer cases or road rage.
Brighter lights are far safer, which is why cars have turned to them.
@@Robert-cu9bm Not safer, just brighter
@@Naturallystated
Go and learn about car safety
@@Naturallystated the problem is the LED lights are excessively blue, when our vision is tuned to red-orange-yellow. The french used to require yellow headlights.
@@Robert-cu9bm safer for the driver sure but not safe for anyone who are oncoming who get blinded by the light of God .
I was an army mechanic, no matter the actual repair job, adjust headlights was always on the list. Most British military vehicles had the same Lucas Headlamps.
It's pretty funny seeing this just now. A few weeks ago, a friend of mine had a headlight out on his car and went to the auto parts store to pick up a replacement. He came out, put the new bulb in, and it didn't work because it was not compatible. Just goes to show how good this idea actually was
"Guy bought the wrong bulb, and because it didn't work, I now wish there were one single choice for every vehicle ever."
@@AndrooUK correct
@@Turtlejohn8 based
Blame the seller. Or may be your friend for not giving the proper bulb number from the owners' manual.
@@Rich96c4ce when there's only two bulbs, you don't have to deal with that bullshit. You either get square or round.
The biggest step backwards in automotive lighting I have seen this far is having the reverse lights used to light around the vehicle when it is parked. So you’re looking for a parking space and see a car with their reverse lights on there’s no way you can see who is driving, then you realize they’re not backing up because nobody’s in the car at all. Same for pedestrians trying to walk from their parking space you see reverse lights and think someone is about to reverse but they never do. Consistent conditioning of this will lead to more folks driving behind people actually trying to back out of parking spaces.
GM wanted that lighting feature but didn't want to add costly lights. Some joker realized that falsely claiming you are backing-up is not a violation of the DOT and so that's what they used. It can be disabled but is on by default from the dealer. I have a heck of a time backing out sometimes and I suspect that GM hardware-hack is a part of that.
I think this is just a GM thing. But it absolutely should be banned.
Never seen that here in Europe.
That's one of the worst "features" out there.
YESS, and this can't be overstated. What an absolute bozo an engineer has to be, to think that this is a good idea.
We should have a petition to bring back the sealed beam lights, and force standardization on alternators, steering pumps and AC compressors. It's at the point now where I'm pretty sure they just change the design every two years to make sure you have to buy a new one from them so you can feel the hurt of the supply chain.
I'm torn on this
I`d love to be able to go even a bit further than this, wheel bearings ? standardize by wheel size/ weight required, shocks ? the same, pretty much standardize anything possible, EGR ? standardize by engine size/power, engine mounts ? standard !
You're right about the manufacturers doing it on purpose. Back in the day they would deliberately use bizarre non-standard nut and bolt sizes on new models to force mechanics to buy new (overpriced) spanners from the vehicle manufacturer. It took federal regulation to put an end to the practice and standardize the nut and bolt sizes.
@@marcusmoonstein242 They still do that in the tech industry. In every product. Ever.
I get why you say this, but these are items that are not safety related. And where would it stop? There's already too much government in out cars today IMO.
I remember in the 1980's, a coworker got into a minor fender-bender that broke his Mazda's headlamp. When I was paying $5 to replace my sealed beam, he was spending a few hundred dollars to replace his. I've always preferred the older lamps.